How To Properly Load Your Paint Brush

This was written with the art of face painting in mind, but most of the same techniques are true for other paint mediums and can be used with other paint mediums.

I'm sure most of this you already know, but I don't want to assume and leave something out, so we will be covering some basics in this post.

1. Know Your Paint:
Paradise for example is a Glycerin based paint, and is easier to blend and takes longer to dry. Tag, DFX, and Wolf are all wax based paints and will dry a little faster but you can get bolder colors.

Wax based works better over top of Glycerin but not so much the other way around I find. They also don't mix together as nicely as they would if you were using all the same base.

Not sure what your brand of face paint is? Check out this neat chart from Jest Paint



2. Know Your Brushes:
Real hair brushes don't work so well for most makeups, weed the real hair brushes out of your kit and switch to synthetic.

You also want to get smooth brushes, and not 'chip' brushes (as I call them) that are more rough.

If your brushes look like this

Banish them from your kit.

You want smooth soft brushes like these

Now that you know your paints and are using the best brushes for this medium it's now time for.....

3. How To Load a Brush:
Now that we know more about the tools we are using lets look at how to properly load a brush.

Water:
When you rinse or dip your brush into the water you want to take it out almost dry; you do this by putting your brush on the edge of the jar with the tip facing inward, then pressing a bit and letting the water from the brush drain back into the jar.

If it's a pretty thick brush, you might also want to give it a few pats on your brush cloth too. You want your brush to start out damp, not wet when you first go into the paint. This is because it's easier to add more water then to take away water from your paint.

Start with the least amount of water and add a little bit more if you find it's too dry by dipping juuuuust the tip of the brush into the water. The brush will act a little like a sponge and soak up the water on contact so put just the tip in the water.

Do this until you find a nice consistency, and as you are painting also be aware of the wetness of your paints, as you may not need to add any water to them afterwards for a bit.


Direction:
Yes it's best to load it all the way up to the ferrule you got that right, but more importantly it's best to load the brush by going back and forth in the paint.
Do you paints have 'holes' in them from swirling the brush in your favorite spot? This is rather common. But it's not the right way to load the brush if you want to get the most out of it.

Swirling the brush gets the paint all over the place on your brush, but it's not packing in properly along the bristles. Swirling will also damage the bristles of the brush and have them wear out faster. Finally by instead loading your brush back and forth, you are going with the natural alignment of the bristles and you will find your paint is able to 'flow' out of the brush much better, smoother, and most importantly for longer.

This will speed up your painting as you don't have to reload as often.

Finally, use the whole surface of the cake, don't pick a favorite spot to load from/ As said with applying water to the paints, some times one area can get 'too wet'. Avoid this pit fall by using different areas of the paint cake and avoid sticking to a 'favorite spot'. Bonus is this will also help your paints look better, and you can avoid that great hole to China you get with swirling, and using one spot too much.