Our professional artist brushes now come in short clear acrylic handles perfect for up close work and long twice dipped handles designed for painting at the easel.

Synthetic Brush

This type of brush was developed in the late 1970's due to the popularity of the bottled acrylics.  It is used today to apply the thinner acrylics associated with today's Decorative Painters. Our brush is slightly different than other synthetic brushes found in the decorative painting industry. Our higher quality hair is based on the thicker bodied properties of Heritage MultiMedia Artist Acrylics. This brush is slightly stiffer than the Fusion brush but much softer than the bristle. A perfect intermediate brush for pushing around thicker bodied artist acrylics without leaving distracting brush marks you get with bristles. Many of our programs and the techniques are designed to emulate the older and traditional alla prima techniques from the 19th century.  These techniques were developed before the synthetic brush, but we can give the same looks when the brush is designed to work with the paint. This brush hair was specifically designed for Heritage MultiMedia painting techniques.

Bristle Brush

This is one of the oldest and most traditional types of brushes.  We use this brush in several landscape lessons and a few floral lessons in our programs.  The traditional bristle brush is made from hog hair and is very stiff.  This stiffness allows the artist to push around very thick amounts of paint.  It also allows the use of many newer and specialized techniques developed by our studio. Many times we use the brush held very flat to give new and unique looks to the edges of clouds, trees and water. This requires a very stiff brush to work in conjunction with the thicker qualities of Heritage MultiMedia. We designed this brush with slightly longer bristles which keeps the tips slightly softer while also allowing for the unique movements of the thicker paint.

Ersatz Fusion Brush

This is the workhorse of many of our Paint It Simply and Art of Painting programs.  This brush was developed a few years ago for watercolor, softer color applications and our Paint It Simply program.  This very unique hair emulates the softer squirrel brush used by oil painters for the past 400 years.  It is perfect for many of the alla prima, premier coup and wet in wet brush techniques used in our programs. This brush is also specifically designed for the "color blocking" and "half tone" artist techniques in our newer educational programs. The softer more absorbent hairs of the fusion allow the artist program to achieve rich and mottled oil emulation effects.  This brush is used on many flowers and mottled effects where we need to "flow" color and not mix colors. Many artists, once they try this brush, will never go back to other brands of synthetics. Modern synthetics can not paint our Paint It Simply lessons and likewise, the Fusion brush is too soft for many other decorative painting applications.