royal & langnickel

To fill out my brush roster, I ordered a 7-pack of Royal & Langnickel brushes for $5.50. When it arrived, the pouch was hanging open and most of the brushes had fallen out in transit. Only 3 were left.

I thought about getting a refund, but Walmart’s return policy requires me to physically return the item to the store. Bro, a round trip to your dumb big box store would cost at least $30 in Uber fees. Not worth it for a $5.50 item. I am just gonna have to eat the loss. But I am going to cut up one of the brushes in revenge.

Nah, kidding. Cutting up one of the brushes was the plan from the start. Sarah Cray did a tutorial on how to cut up a brush to make a foliage brush, which seemed easy and highly useful. (Doing foliage with my round 5 gives me a bunch of round dots. Well, what do you expect.) So I bought a set of the cheapest brushes I could find. I had been planning to cut up the round 10, but apparently the round 10 got wind of my plans and escaped with some of its fellows, so I cut up one of its friends instead.

The three brushes I got:

• A round petal/leaf brush (“filbert”) – haven’t tried this out, but it looks fun
• A wash brush – I specifically wanted this one. useful for landscapes so I’m not trying to wet large areas of my sketchbook with a round 5.
• A flat-top brush that’s basically a smaller version of the wash brush

So I cut up the flat-top. It took a bit of trial and error to get right; initially I didn’t cut enough, and it mostly just produced blobs. But eventually I got it to a nice spackle effect.

It’s kinda wild how much I’m learning about watercolors. Some of this is based on imitating techniques and following advice from tutorials. Some of it is just practice.

• water control (vital for lighter/darker values and just generally getting the paint to do what you want. it takes a while to get a feel for how much water you want in a given situation)
• brush control (sadly I did not get the round 0 brush THAT I BOUGHT, but I can tell just with my round 5 that my control is way better. look at the branches on my trees 10 days ago as compared to now)
• color mixing (for instance, my kit includes a warm medium brown. to get a dark desaturated brown, I mix it with ultramarine. this feels utterly wack but apparently color theory be like that)
• using water as a hotfix (if you make a mistake, you can blot it out with a bit of water. that one’s easy. I recently also discovered you can adjust the shape of branches by smearing with water along one edge only. point is, water is very versatile and very good)
• layering (for instance, the trees on my recent shark pic have four layers: 1. light/wet background wash. 2. while it’s still wet, add light/wet foliage. let it dry completely. 3. add more foliage on top with drier brush + darker hue. 4. add trunk and branches.)