Marcula Stauffer explains how essential it is to select perfect paintbrushes for acrylics artists

Being a professional acrylic artist, Mark Marcula Stauffer shares his experience of selecting the best brushes to paint in an effective manner. Acrylics are fast-drying paints that can be used straight from a tube, like oil paints, or can be thinned with water, like watercolor. They are extremely versatile and vibrant, offering the artist a wide range of textures, colors, and consistencies.

Buying paintbrushes for acrylics can be a bamboozling experience. Here, he explains different types of paintbrushes and their sizes. There are various sizes and shapes of paintbrushes which can be used for acrylics, oils, watercolors. The common eight paintbrushes are round, pointed round, flat, filbert, and angular flat, and fan, detail round and bright.

However, the two main brush shapes for acrylic painting are rectangular and flat, and round and pointed” says Mark Marcula Stauffer. Flat or rectangle brushes have square, flexible ends and can hold a lot of paint. When used flat, they can make long strokes and are well suited to blend and paint in large areas. The tip and sides can also be used for more delicate lines and small touches. Round and pointed brushes have a large belly that tapers to a fine point and is capable of bold strokes that can cover large areas.

According to Marcula Stauffer, if you are a complete newbie you can start off simply with two brushes like a mid-sized flat brush and mid-sized round brush. As you develop the skills to encompass different techniques, you can accumulate most brush types.

Last but not least comes the sizes of the brushes which vary accordingly to the different brush shapes. Mark Marcula Stauffer believes that the most commonly used sizes of the paintbrushes are a mid-size brush for versatility, small size brushes for detail work, and large size brushes for painting large areas and washes.