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People ask me which brush company and I have to laugh. For the fine black line in Mithila work we do not buy brushes at all. We take a small twig, neem or sometimes bamboo, and we chew the end of it, or press and roll it on a stone until the tip becomes soft and pointed like a needle. Then it is a brush. Nothing else. I keep a small bundle of them tied with thread and when one goes blunt I simply cut the tip and make it again. My mother used to do this sitting outside in the morning light and I do the same now. It is the first work of the day, before any painting. The twig has to be fresh, if it dries it splits and you cannot get the line. So there is a little tree behind the house and my grandson is always the one sent to break the branches, which he does very happily and very badly. Somebody from Delhi once saw my bundle and asked if I could not simply use a 0.1 mm brush from the art shop. I said I could. I did not say I would. The line from a chewed twig is not like the line from a brush. It drinks colour and gives it slowly. If your hand is not steady it will show, there is no help from the bristles. So the twig keeps me honest. When I have not painted for many days I feel it in the first twig, the line comes out shivering. That is my measure of practice. Only difficulty is the colour. My twigs are good for black and for fine work, but for filling large areas the squirrel hair brush from my mother's time is still doing duty, and it is now more thread than hair. I have not found anybody here who makes them. If any of you know a person, kindly tell me.

The brush for the fine line, the one for the outlines, that brush is now having only three hairs. My mother used that same brush. Before her also it was there in the house. The bamboo handle is black and shining from oil of the hand only, no varnish ever. My son said buy a new one from Patna, it is nothing, hundred rupees. I said you bring it and I will see. He brought. The new brush hairs are too many, too stiff. It drinks more paint and puts it down thick, and in Mithila line the whole thing is that the line should be thin like a thread of the sari border and should go and come back without shaking. So now I am doing the peacock tail with three hairs and it is taking double time. Last week I finished only two sheets. The fish border I did in one and half day which normally is half day work. There is a girl who is coming to learn, Sudha, fourteen years. She asked why not just use the new one, it is better brush. I told her the new brush is better for the person who is learning, so the hand becomes steady. For me the three hairs are giving the line I know. But I am also thinking now whether I am keeping the old thing because it is good or only because it is old. That question is sitting with me since two days. Anyway. Work is going slow and the eyes are getting tired by evening. If anybody here is having a brush they have kept beyond its life, I would like to hear honestly how long you kept it.

ok this is going to sound ridiculous but i'm sitting here cleaning my brushes after finishing a piece and i got genuinely emotional over my old escoda. i've had this one brush since my second year of undergrad, it's a size 10 travel brush, the handle is all chewed up because i was a nervous student who bit her brushes (gross i know but i was 19 and stressed), the ferrule is slightly loose, and i've rewarped the bristles like three times with my mouth after bad cleaning habits. but it still holds a point better than any new brush i own. i literally cannot paint without it. i dropped it once in 2018 and my heart stopped for a second. i know brushes are technically replaceable and there's this whole "don't get attached to tools" mentality in art but like. NO. i AM attached. this thing has been through every single painting i've ever been proud of. it was in my hand when i painted my dad's portrait the year he died. it came with me to every shitty shared studio i've ever had. it's survived three moves and a minor flood. my partner bought me a fancy new escoda for christmas and i keep it in the wrapper because i'm scared to use it. i don't want to replace my old one. it's not the same. anyone else have that one tool that's basically a part of them at this point

My mother used the same small bamboo brush for forty years before she gave it to me. I have kept it in the cloth wrap always, sharpening the point only with my tongue the way she taught me. Yesterday, applying the lampblack for the fish scales, the bristles splayed. Just gave up, like that. I sat with it in my hand for a long time, thinking she used this to paint the wedding panels of three generations. Now the point is gone and no amount of sharpening brings it back. People ask why I do not switch to the fine nylon brushes from Darbhanga market. They are cheaper, they last, the line is even. But this brush carried my mother's fingers. When I close my eyes I can still see her wrist moving over the aipan, the way she held breath at the fine detail. A new brush will have to learn me. I will have to teach it my grandmother's stroke. It feels like losing a person a second time. Today I opened the new brush and made one honest line with it. Not good yet. But the fish have to be painted, ji. The story does not wait.🙏

I have this one flat brush, a no-name synthetic I picked up at a craft store for maybe $4 five years ago. The ferrule is a little loose and the bristles have a slight curve to them now. I own brushes that cost ten times as much and are objectively better in every way. And yet almost every painting I finish has that brush somewhere in the process. I think at this point it's muscle memory. I know exactly how much paint it holds, how it lays down a wash, how hard to press to get the exact edge I want. A new brush would be sharper and cleaner and probably better. But I don't want to break in another one. My husband doesn't get it. He keeps saying just buy a new one, it's four dollars. But it's not about the money. It's about the fact that this specific brush has been in my hand for every painting I've made since I came back to this. I'm not sentimental about much but I guess I am about this.

She's fifteen, she knows. It was sitting there, she needed something "precise," and now there is a crust of PVA halfway up the belly of a Raphael 8404 I have had since my atelier years. I've been soaking it for two days. It is not coming back. The point is gone and the hairs have splayed out like a broom. The thing is I can't even shout properly because I remember being fifteen and doing exactly this to my father's things, and also because she was proud of the project, and also because a brush is a brush. But it is not only a brush. You break in a good brush over years. It learns your hand. That one knew mine. She offered me her pocket money. I said no and then went and sat in the studio for a while feeling stupid about how much it bothered me. Anyway. It's in the jar with the ruined ones now, the graveyard jar. If anyone has a trick for reviving a sable that has been abused with glue I will hear it, but I suspect I am just going to buy a new one and be sad about it for a week.

I keep my brushes in the freezer. The wide hake ones, the ones I use to lay the sensitiser. Not for any reason I can defend. It started one August when the studio was thirty-four degrees and the coating was drying before it reached the paper, and someone told me cold brushes hold the emulsion longer. So I put them in the freezer overnight and the next morning the coating went down like water on glass. Now it is February and they are still in there, between the frozen peas and a bag of coffee I forgot about. My partner opened it last night looking for ice and just looked at me. I said nothing. There is nothing to say. The brushes live in the freezer now. Today I coated six sheets of Arches, hung them to dry in the dark, and the light through the window was the flat grey that means rain by four. I used to fight days like this. Now I just coat fewer sheets and let the sky decide. The brushes will be cold when I take them out and that is the whole of my method.

I let them go for about three weeks. Three weeks of painting, rinsing, pretending that was enough. Then today I sat down with the turpentine and the soap and actually did it right, brush by brush, and I kept finding pigment that had been living in the ferrule since before Christmas. The whole afternoon gone. It's the most productive hour I'll spend this week and it produced nothing at all. I don't know why I resist it. I know exactly what it costs me. A dirty brush is a different tool, the color comes out muddy, you fight it and blame yourself. And still every single time I convince myself that one more rinse is fine. The good part: the big flat I use for glazing came up clean and it's like getting a new brush. I'm almost tempted to leave them all perfect and not paint tomorrow. Almost.

I have this one flat brush I've been using for like three years. It's got the perfect worn-in edge, holds paint exactly right, does that thing where it lays down a clean line without me thinking about it. I found myself babying it today, wiping it extra gently, not letting it sit in water, basically treating a $9 brush like it's hand-carved by monks. Which is insane because I bought three backups of the exact same brush and they all feel wrong. Stiffer. New. Useless. So now I've got a brush that's too good to use and three that aren't good enough. I think I just need to destroy the good one in a painting and accept the new ones will get there eventually. Same thing happened with a palette knife a couple years back. It's a cycle. Everything I love becomes unusable because I love it too much.

I keep a small notebook with every brush I've ever owned. The maker, the size, the year I bought it, and the year it finally gave out. My oldest current one is a Series 7 No. 2 from 1998. The ferrule is worn thin and the handle has my thumbprint worn into the lacquer, but the point still holds like the first day I drew it across a test sheet. I don't know why I started the docket. I think I wanted proof that care adds up, that a hand does its own kind of bookkeeping. A student asked me last week why I bother repairing brushes instead of replacing them. She meant it kindly. I told her that a new brush knows nothing yet. Mine remember which paper I used in 2004, and they behave accordingly. She laughed the way people do when they think you're joking. I wasn't. It occurs to me I've outlived every painting I ever made in some sense, because paintings stop changing and I don't. But the brushes do. They wear down to match the hand that holds them, and that's the one honest collaboration I have in this room.

My favorite flat brush, a Princeton Catalyst I bought at a workshop two years ago, the one I was so precious with I'd wash it twice and never let it sit in the water cup, finally shed a bristle today mid-stroke on a sky I was actually happy with. It stuck right in the middle of a cloud. I fished it out but the damage was done, both to the painting and my trust lol. I know brushes wear out, that's what they do. But I swear I've been so careful with this one. Meanwhile the cheap multipack brushes I bought on a whim at Michael's are all still perfectly intact. Makes me wonder if I should just stop getting attached to nice supplies and treat everything as disposable. But then I think about how that Catalyst felt in the hand, how it laid down a smooth wash... ugh. Anyway I guess I'm in the market for a new favorite brush. Anyone else ever have a tool breakup that stung more than it should?

I still make my own brushes from neem twigs sometimes. Not always, I have proper ones also, from the city, my son brought me. But for the very fine line work, the kind you see on the border of a Sita kalyan painting, nothing works quite like the neem twig brush. You chew the end soft, shape it with your teeth, then trim it. My grandmother could make one in two minutes without even looking. I still cannot do it like her. But I try. When I am using a store brush I feel something missing. The twig brush, it does not hold so much colour. You have to dip again and again. But the line, thin like a hair, steady. The hand remembers. Yesterday I broke one I was making. The wood split wrong. I sat there a while just looking at it. Then I went outside and found another twig.🙂

Today I was cleaning my brushes after finishing a small fish motif piece and I counted the years on the oldest one. That brush came from my mother's hand when I was maybe seventeen. She gave it to me for my first independent commission, a wedding scroll. It has lost hairs, the handle is wrapped in thread twice over, but the point is still true. My son says I should buy new ones, that the bamboo from the market is cheap. But a brush that has learned your hand is not the same as a new one. It knows how much pressure I put when I am drawing the fine lines of the peacock feathers. New brush, it will wobble. This one, it behaves. People these days they think tools are to be replaced when they become old. I think tools become useful only when they become old. Like a good wife's rolling pin or my father's plough, still in the shed even though we have tractor now. Some things you keep because they carry the memory of the work. The thread wrapping is from my mother's old sari, by the way. So even the repair is from her. How can I throw that away. 🙏

Started painting again this morning after three days of not touching anything, work stuff piled up, you know how it goes. And I sat down with my palette and realised I was reaching for the same brush I always reach for first. This old Winsor & Newton series 7, size 6 round. The ferrule is slightly loose now, I should probably fix it, but I just can't use anything else for the first wash. I've bought fancier ones. Tried a silver brush black velvet that everyone raves about. It's good, it's fine. But this one has been through every bad painting and every good one. It holds water just right even if it's a little beat up. It's not even my most expensive brush. It's just mine. My husband says I'm superstitious. Maybe. But there's something about having a tool that's broken in with your own bad habits. You know exactly how it's going to behave, even when it misbehaves. Does anyone else have that one thing, brush, pen, pencil, whatever, that you keep going back to even though you have nicer ones? Or am I just being sentimental over a loose ferrule 😅

I found out this week I've been cleaning my brushes wrong for about twenty years. Wet palettes, mediums, all that I figured out eventually, but brushes? Soaking them tip-down in a jar of water overnight "to keep them soft." My brushes have been splitting and splaying and I just thought that's what happened to brushes eventually. A friend at the Tuesday workshop watched me put mine away and just went... no. Told me to wipe them, rinse, shape the tip with a little soap, lay them flat. I was so embarrassed and so relieved at the same time. Did a whole painting session tonight and my round brush held its point the entire time, no split hairs driving me insane. I'm 42. That's probably 20 years of fighting my brushes for no reason. How is that not demoralizing, except that it's also kind of thrilling to know there's probably a dozen more dumb things I've been doing that long that I just never thought to question? What else am I missing. Someone tell me your version of this so I feel less alone 😅

I bought a pack of those super cheap synthetic brushes at Michael's a few months ago, like $8 for a dozen, just to beat up on for texture work and practice pieces. And now I reach for them almost every time over the nice ones my husband got me for Christmas. They're not even good brushes. The ferrule is wobbly and one of them is already shedding. But they're the exact right stiffness for how I actually paint, and I'm not scared to mess them up. That's the thing. The nice ones sit in the jar and I keep talking myself out of using them because what if I ruin them. Meanwhile the $8 ones are doing all the real work. I think I need to just give the good ones to a purpose. Use them on a piece I actually care about and stop treating them like they're museum pieces. Anyone else have brushes they are weirdly protective of and never use? Or am I just hoarding nice art supplies like everybody does.

I have a flat hog brush, maybe fifteen years old now. The ferrule is loose, the handle has a crack running through it where I must have left it in solvent too long once, and the bristles are worn down to almost half their original length. It's useless for any kind of clean stroke. But I keep it because it does something no new brush can do, it leaves a mark that's broken, a little ragged, like the paint itself is hesitating. I've tried to buy the same model new. It doesn't work the same way. A new brush is too polite. This happens with tools, but also with the way you work. You develop habits that are actually just wear patterns, and then you mistake them for technique. I don't know if that's a problem or just how it goes.

just realized I've been letting my good sable brushes dry with the ferrule facing down this whole time. like ten years. water runs into the glue, wood swells, hairs start splaying. I've been blaming the cheap paint. my grandfather did the same thing with his chisels, left them in a coffee can of water overnight. I used to laugh at him for it. now I'm him. switched to a drying rack today, feels like a betrayal of every brush I've already destroyed. anyway if you're the type who hides your brushes from yourself so you don't have to admit you treat them badly, this is your sign.

People think the cleaning is over when the water runs clear. For me that is the first cleaning, the one you do because you have to, and it takes four minutes. The second one is the next morning, before I touch anything else, sitting on the stool with a jar of Marseille soap and shaping each brush back into its point with my fingers. It is not really about the brushes. It is the only part of the day where I am not trying to make something. Twenty minutes of small repetitive motion, olive oil soap, the smell of it, and by the end my hands have stopped being nervous about the painting. If I skip it and go straight to the easel, I paint badly. Not always, but enough that I stopped testing it. A filbert with a bent ferrule is a dead thing, by the way. I say that with love to the people who keep them for sentiment. Throw it out. Now it is nearly midnight and I have nine brushes in the jar waiting for tomorrow, which is a good number. Ten means I was doing something with too many colours and should think about why.

Okay so I have this round sable brush, size 6, I've had it since like second year of uni and the handle is literally cracked all the way down the middle and held together with washi tape. The ferrule is loose. It wobbles. Anyone else would have tossed it years ago but it holds a point sharper than anything I've bought since and I'm convinced it absorbed some kind of magic from all the paintings it's been through. I tried to replace it twice, bought two very expensive "upgrades," both are sitting in the cup collecting dust because they just don't behave the same. My partner thinks I'm insane. They offered to buy me a matching new set for my birthday and I had to gently explain that would be like replacing a childhood dog with a similar-looking dog and expecting no one to notice. Anyway I spent the morning painting a pear and the brush is fine, the pear is fine, the washi tape is doing its job. Just needed to say it out loud to people who might understand instead of my mother who asked if I could just "use a different one" like it's that simple. 😭 Do you have a brush (or pencil, or palette knife, anything) that you'd defend to the death?