Speed your painting journey by knowing the best techniques. Brad Teare expands and adds to the best of his Thick Paint Blog-a site dedicated to painting with thick texture.
I've read many books and essays by favorite painters who say they prefer to paint with a bristle bright, or a bristle flat, or a sable round, but few communicate why they prefer these brushes. There's nothing wrong with experimenting with a variety of brushes but it is wrong to stick with a particular brush just because someone else likes it and you want to paint like them.
Experiment with a variety of tools but constantly ask is this brush making the mark I want? I often paint with a bristle bright because it acts like a textured palette knife, that is, I can load the brush with a lot of paint and then, keeping the handle nearly parallel to the surface of the canvas, spread the paint almost like a palette knife. I can more easily preserve the multicolored stroke without disturbing the loosely mixed paint. Such an application also imparts the texture of the bristles. I like the way a palette knife lays down loosely mixed color but I don't like the smooth aspect of the stroke (although such a stroke does have a place. Sky or water might be a good place for a stroke with a lot of broken color but doesn't want to call attention to itself via strong texture).
If I want a variety of color on my brush by scraping color from mounds of pigment on my palette I prefer a bristle flat. The bristle flat will act like a rubber spatula that squeegees up bits of color, a quality I need if I'm going to be picking up bits of color to lay down in a single brush stroke. The longer bristles of the flat allow the collective bristles to bend more allowing me to flick up bits of color from various mounds of color. I suspect this method is the one preferred by most painters.
If I were going to be painting without texture I would use a sable brush. But since I like texture I use bristles exclusively. I rarely use round bristles although I keep a few on hand for laying down strokes to represent fence posts, telephone poles, and tree branches–although these features can be convincingly made with the edge of a bristle flat or a bristle bright.
The opposite ends of brushes can be used to scratch a variety of shapes. I occasionally sharpen the end of the brush with an electric pencil sharpener to use the pointed end to add complexity to an edge by scraping, scribbling, or simply scratching calligraphic marks such as grass or weeds. This technique is called sgraffito and many plein air painters use it to add their signatures in the field.
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