I had to order a couple things from Dick Blick last night (shut up. the last art supply house in town died an unhappy death two years ago. It’s either that or brave the hell of Hobby Lobby and their sanctimonous uberChristian propaganda.) and so I did a quick scan through the site to see if there was anything else I needed — and I found it.
The Brush.
The Brush that I instructed Paul to buy a dozen of if he found them in New York. The Brush I’ve used, and favored, faithfully for fifteen years. The Winsor Newton Sceptre Gold II Series 101 Short-Handled Pointed Round, Size Three.
See, all the crazymaking stemmed from the fact that for the last four years, the size three was completely unavailable. Every store I went into had sizes 0, 1, 2, 4, 6. Every catalog: 0, 1, 2, 4, 6. I scoured the internet — and I’m good at that. No luck. I considered contacting WN directly. They apparrently still made them; they were featured in their catalogue. The size 2 is too small. The size 4 is too big. The size 3 is just right. Perfect, snappy, sharp, capable of holding enough paint to blanket a whole panel, and still small and pointy enough to turn right around and do tiny detail work. If you have a size 3, you don’t need any other sizes — it does everything. It’s four-dollar brush that holds up amazingly well against the twin punishments of acrylic paint and a lazy artist — I can usually get five to ten pages out of one before I have to relegate it to paint-mixing tasks, as opposed to fine detail work.
So I ordered five. If the quality’s there, I’ll order another dozen. I’m not kidding. I know what tools I like, and which ones perform, and when I can’t get them, I get grumpy.
And no one likes a grumpy Janer.