Creating Fine Detail With A Liner Brush

​The first step to ensuring success when it comes to creating detail in this way, is to choose the right liner brush. This is the one I use. 

​It’s called a script liner brush and you can see the bristles are very long. They’re probably about an inch long and that’s what you want because those kinds of brushes will hold their shapes.

​This is an example of a bad liner brush. 

​It’s just that it has a bunch of dried paint in it, which of course is bad, but the bristles are very short. As a result, it loses its shape quickly, and you have lots of hairs sticking out in all directions.

​So how do you use this type of brush? First I’m going to show you how to paint super fine lines, like barely thicker than a strand of hair. To do this, you first roll the brush around in some paint.

You want the paint to be spread along the length of the bristles, like this, 

​not all collected at the tip. Okay, so when you paint, to make your line as thine as possible, you’re barely going to touch the canvas with just the tip of your brush, like I’m showing you.

​You can see me use this method in my painting, “Turkey On The Grass”, here 

and you can see the results in the turkey's eye here.

​Now sometimes you might want a line that’s a bit thicker than that, but still smaller than what you can get with, say, a round brush. The same principle of rolling the brush around in the paint applies, but instead of just letting the tip touch the canvas this time, you’re going to let part, or all, of the length of the bristles touch the canvas, depending on just how thick you want your line to be.

You can see these tips in action in the video below.