It takes many kinds of paint brushes to transform a room, or a piece of furniture, from dull to brilliant. Or, for that matter, from garish to clean and white.
Common sense can prevail in most things. For fine work, whether it’s the small, interior bits of furniture or the corners of a room. Larger brushes can be useful for big surfaces on furniture, and for touching up walls. Most brushes you’ll buy at the hardware store have synthetic bristles. Natural hair brushes are a lot more expensive, but they give you more control of where the paint is going and a smoother application. These brushes are more closely related to artists paint brushes than the synthetic sort, which are more for spreading paint.
Synthetic brushes are perfectly serviceable, just pay close attention to the quality of the bristles. More expensive brushes have flagged tips, which means that the bristles have been split to allow the paint to be spread more evenly and thickly. Stiffer, cheaper bristles on cheaper brushes make it almost impossible to keep painting marks from marring your wall’s finish.
How you clean your brushes depends on what kind of paint you use. For most water based paints a strong detergent like dish soap and warm water will let you get most of the paint out of the bristles. Soaking can help, for stubborn paint. Some water based paints are mixed with additives that make them more durable and shiny that make them almost as tough to get out of a brush as oil based paints are. For them, and for oil based paints, you’ll need paint thinner.
Next week, paint rollers!
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