TOPIC:

I was at a bit of a loose end, and doing more on my Cheetah & Wild Willy didn't appeal, so I thought I'd catalogue my brushes ... turns out I have about 50 "model" sized ones at the moment ...






1- remains of my collection from my youth, most of these are "natural" bristled Humbrol brushes dating from around 1988, some of them are getting a bit bald!

2- Recent "natural" bristle Revell purchases. Rubbish, loosing bristles at an alarming rate.

3- Unbranded "natural" bristle brushes, "free" in an Airfix kit. Pretty poor, very bendy plastic.

4- Fairly recent Humbrol brushes, larger ones were "free" in Wallace & Gromit/Shaun the Sheep kits, smaller ones I bought in a _real_ shop, green ones are from the "Coloro" range, small brown one is a "President", black ones have no fancy title. All have synthetic bristles.

5- eBay bulk purchase of 10 identical ("natural" bristle) Humbrol brushes. Business ends are fine, but as you can see, they lost all the paint off the handles very quickly.

6- set of nine, very cheap (& quite nasty) flat brushes, bought for dry brushing & they work ok for that, but I've only used a couple of them.

7- New purchase: Humbrol "Evoco" 4-pack of sizes 0, 2, 4, & 6. Synthetic.

8- New purchase: four size 0 "Expo" branded synthetic bristle brushes;


I can see why people are a bit snobbish about synthetic bristle brushes - the set of black flat brushes I have are probably as bad an example of the worst of how synthetic bristles used to be - very thick & the same thickness all the way up, but the Humbrol ones I started using a few years ago are very impressive - bristles are individually tapered, soft at the pointy end, but stiff enough to hold a lot of their shape when loaded with paint in a way that "natural" bristles don't, and the brushes don't seem to lose bristles.

TBH "synthetic" bristles have improved so much - and offer advantages over "natural" bristles - so I don't think I'd ever buy anything else now. I would add a caveat on price though - decent brushes start at 1.50 GBP (2 EUR) each.