It’s a scary feeling when you finally get to the end of that big full sheet marine painting and you have to face up to putting in the masts and rigging. All that good work can be ruined with a few wobbly lines.
Use your little finger as a guide for straight, confident lines.
This is where a well trained rigger brush can make all the difference. Clean, fine, confident lines can mean the difference between success and failure. So practice this exercise to train your rigger brush to make nice straight confident lines.
Hold your brush perpendicular to the paper
Stand so you make the stroke across in front of you. From left to right if you are right handed (right to left if left handed)
Decide where the line will start and finish. Put the tip of your brush down on the starting point, move quickly and smoothly to the finish point, stop, then lift your brush off.
Make the brush stroke with a big sweeping movement from the shoulder
Don’t move your wrist and don’t flick your brush off at the end of the stroke – you will teach it bad habits!
TIP
You can keep your little finger on the paper as a guide while you make the line. This stops the up and down movement of the bristles and keeps the line even.
Use the back of an old painting or a sheet of cartridge paper – as long as it’s flat with no creases or bumps, the paper quality doesn’t matter.
Dragging Straight Brush Lines
Another trick you can teach a rigger brush is to make a nice straight line by dragging. The secret to this brush technique is to let the brush do the work. Load it with paint, lay the bristles on the paper at the start of the line and drag it steadily towards you. You may have to turn your painting around to do this. Don’t put any downward pressure on the brush. Resting the end of the handle on your finger is the best method. If the brush tends to slip off a small piece of blue tak or masking tape around the end of the brush will stop it.
Let the brush rest lightly on your finger then drag it towards you without any downward pressure.
Brush Techniques For Flat Even Washes
In this exercise we are going to teach our Hake Brush to take some of the responsibility for a nice even wash. We will put down a wash in the usual way then, with a dry Hake Brush go over the wash and even it out.
Move the brush quickly and lightly in all directions.
The best way to practice this is on the back of, or over the top of an old painting. Mix up a wash and put it over an area of the painting, then, before it starts to dry use your Hake brush to lightly feather over the surface. Keep the brush dry by rubbing it on an old dry towel after every few strokes. The idea is to even out the distribution of pigment and water. Use quick short strokes, back and forth in all directions
A piece of old towel is handy for keeping your Hake dry
This brush technique works well on graded washes too, smoothing out the gradation from pigment to damp paper.
Controlled Release With One Inch One Stroke Brush
Now its time to work on our larger flat brushes. This is an excellent brush technique for over painting texture. The idea is to drag the brush and gradually lower the handle until the brush stops releasing paint. This is usually the point where the handle is almost parallel to the paper.
With the handle almost parallel to the paper the brush starts to make interesting, fractured marks.
Once you find this spot subtly lifting and lowering the brush controls how much paint is released. You will find you can leave a trail of broken, fractured paint that is just perfect for the texture of weathered timber, stippled tree trunks or the shimmery effect of light bouncing off water. Your flat brushes will have no trouble learning this trick.
Post time: Oct-15-2021