Brushes I found useful for painting the sea.

Before I started this blog I did a long thread  on painting waves on Wet Canvas, some of the photos disappeared so I will be pulling over the best ones for this blog and tag them technical information so you (and me too) can find it later. Here is the thread, Wave Studies 100 its big but if you want to paint the sea, it has some real gems I discovered, and you can see where I started and began to work up to higher levels.

I'm beginning to have a feel for certain brushes for making seascapes. More than any other painting I've done I'm using my brushes more specifically for effects. When I paint larger I will have to buy bigger ones, nothing over 3/4 inch here. The bristle brushes are more costly, the rest are synthetic so more affordable. They are arranged in the order of most use.

The top favorite is the Da Vinci Top Acryl, quite stiff, great for rocks and also laying on thick foam, used almost like a palette knife sometimes. Makes thin lines, layins, lifting off back to canvas with turps, makes edges, dragged over paint moves it without blending, my all around brush, pretty pricey for a synthetic brush so look for a sale.

next the short bristle Winton fine hog...for laying out the rocks scrubbing fast and thin. not for upper painting of rocks except for some soft places where they meet the water

DaVinci makes a synthetic cheap student brush line called College, which are perfect substitutes for sable, very soft, great for blending and foam or laying a glaze over wet colors below

Princeton, only one I have that is useful is the long flat, for water and rocks

Round, need this on upper layers foam, maybe to adjust edges

the rigger , for the top breaking up surface foam, the foam trails.

Syn Mongoose, gets me small bits little lines and shadows, and good for tweaking areas, not much use painting, does not leave a defined stroke. Soft enough not to disturb lower layers.

A hog basting brush from the cooking store, for knocking down ridges of paint, softly pulling paint to show movement, and stippling scatters of foam.

You can see by the numbers of the sizes that they mean nothing except within the brand line.

One more thing not here, a short palette knife. For scraping off errors, and very carefully using the edge to create accidental blends in rocks, or smushing edges in the water layers.

you can see I keep the paint to the tips of the brushes , I wipe between colors so there is not a lot of cleaning in solvents, just now and then when it gets too mixed