While I started off my artistic journey mostly working in pen and ink, more and more I find myself favoring painting for a couple reasons. One is I get irresistibly potent colors when I paint in gouache or casein, whereas pen and ink shines a bit better with more subtle color so the details of the ink lines don’t get overwhelmed by intense color. Another huge reason is, I’ve found I like to be able to change things and let a piece evolve somewhat while I work on it (a practice that isn’t very pen and ink friendly). That being said, my experience in pen and ink has come with me on my painting journey, very much influencing my painting style. A rough description of my painting technique may be summed up as many pen and ink artworks (done with brush and paint) layered upon each other. Of course it’s a little more complicated than that but those lines, dashes and dots of pen and ink are the same kind of marks I make in painting.
One of my most needed tools for my style of painting is liner brushes, script liner brushes.
These types of brushes have very long and straight hairs, that are very cylindrical tube shaped with no variation in width except for the sharp tip. The shape is very important because it will make pen-like uniform lines. As far as what type of hair, I’ve found that golden taklons tend to be best, the medium firmness makes them soft enough to hold the paint and stay together without fraying, yet firm enough to move the paint. On-top of all of that they tend to be inexpensive. They’re a great little workhorses.
These particular ones are my favorite these days
Royal Langnickel Zen Brush – Script, Size 1
Royal Langnickel Zen Brush – Script, Size 20/0
Royal Langnickel Zen Brush – Script Liner Brush 10/0
Brush sets for miniature painting or nail painting are usually good choices too if the brushes have the similar tubular, no-belly shape and are made of golden taklon.
More expressive liners
These days I am also using a lot of Chinese painting style liner brushes. They can still make a pretty good consistent width line if you are careful, and they can also make a somewhat more expressive line that varies a bit in width as well. Even with the elongated taper as compared to the taklon liners, they are still some of my favorites to paint with especially when working with Chinese paints on Xuan (Chinese rice paper), and I find that they work really well for casein painting as well.
That’s about it, I’ve tried a lot of liner brushes and since finding these options I haven’t been too adventurous to try anything different since they fit my needs quite well.