Tools
Now that the fun part is out of the way, you’ve got to look at your other supplies: brushes, palettes, and actual surfaces to apply your paint to.
First off, brushes.
We’re going to start basic and start small. Unless you really know what you’re doing, I wouldn’t recommend working large. Therefore, you probably won’t need any large brushes.
There are several types of brushes, but I want you to focus on two: flat and round. Most people are familiar with round brushes (seen at the right). They operate something like a pencil, with a limited range of width variance.
Flat brushes (seen center-left) tend to be less familiar to people but often are the preference for painters. They are like calligraphic pens, offering a variety of lines and thicknesses. If nothing else, grab yourself some of these.
Even if you don’t think you’ll need them, grab yourself some small detail brushes (seen at the left). You will probably always have some small little tiny detail that you need to paint, and you just – can’t – get it - !
And if you’re going to get small brushes, make them worth your while.
As far as how expensive your brushes should be, this is where I break from what is expected and say it really doesn’t matter. You can get the packaged sets, you can buy them individually – I don’t really see a difference. My only advice is that you make sure the brushes you buy are made for acrylic paint, which will be labeled on the package or on the display. I also recommend short-handled brushes (which are about as long as a pencil) for acrylic painting, but this is up to personal preference.
Palettes
You can’t paint from the tube. You’re going to have to get yourself a palette, a place to dump your paint and mix it.
There’s a variety of ways to go here. But the path I’d recommend you stay away from are those small plastic trays that have maybe seven or eight slots for paint. Trust me, you’re going to want something more like…
…this. It’s plastic so can be washed, or you can let the paint dry and peel it off. You can also keep reusing it until you’re sick of it.
Alternatively, if you don’t have plastic, you can use things such as postcard, because they have a slick surface and therefore won’t get too warped by the water content. If you have illustration board laying around, that works too.
Really, anything that won’t get funky when water is applied to it will work well for a palette. You should have something white to show you what the color is.
Canvas
I use the term “canvas” to generally apply to whatever you paint on. Cloth canvas, wood, and paper are probably the three most common surfaces you’ll find being painted on.
Right now, I’m going to come straight out and tell you to paint on paper. But not any kind of paper. Well, it could be any kind of paper. Just read on.
Canvas, being cloth, absorbs paint rather quickly. There’s canvas boards, which are hard and flat, but are also rather terrible to paint on because they’re just not a good surface. I have an aversion to them for all paint types. Wood is a favorite of mine, with the fancy term for it being “panels”. Wood absorbs just enough paint to let you lay down colors, but also spreads them quite well.
The problem with both cloth canvas and wood is that you will need to prime the surface with gesso. Gesso is a thick, white, acrylic-based goop that acts as a surface primer. If you build a canvas from scratch, you need to gesso your fabric so that paint doesn’t soak all the way through. The same applies to wood, but to a lesser extent.
I recommend starting off on illustration board, a thick cardboard-ish surface that tends to be sold in large sheets. You have the right stuff when you can’t bend it without breaking it. This also means it can take a lot of abuse from paint and water. Illustration board is also a lot easier to carry around and requires no building to make.
If you want to paint on paper, I’d be careful. Water and paper tend to not be friends. Watercolor paper is probably a safer avenue. In that case, take care to stretch your paper. You can find tutorials on DeviantArt and through Goggle on how to stretch paper. It’s something I haven’t done and don’t care to explain, so go off on an adventure if you so desire.
