Keelertornero took a break from K-T LAB experiment to test our I Love Art Synthetic Mongoose brushes, testing their possibilities with a range of painting materials.
About I Love Art Synthetic Mongoose brushes
These brushes were promoted in-store as being multi-use: good for watercolour, acrylic and oil. We took this as a challenge and thought we would put this to the test. If that claim turned out to be true then we felt these would be the ideal brushes for us since we tend to regularly swap between acrylic and oil. We don’t often use watercolour, preferring ink, but we thought it would interesting to try the brushes out on some nice watercolour paper and see how they respond. This would also give us an opportunity to use up some watercolour paints we had knocking about the studio.
Let’s start with watercolours.
To this end we set up a series of still lives, in the studio and in the garden (because the weather was nice) with the intention of each doing one piece using watercolour, one with acrylic and one with oil and really put the brushes through their paces.
We started with watercolour since we thought the paint would be the most gentle on the brushes and then move onto acrylic and oil. The brushes seemed to hold the paint well and reacted excellently to the paper with the correct amount of softness and flexibility to spread the paint evenly. Neither of us having had much experience with watercolour found using it generally frustrating, though that was not to do with the brushes, but more to do with getting the paint to behave itself! The brushes themselves performed really well in this context and would definitely be using them again when we eventually come back to watercolour painting.
Next up: Acrylic.
Now back in a place of familiarity we both found using these brushes a joy. They offer good flexibility and stability with the hair highly elastic which allows for the painting of precision lines or broad areas with equal ease.”
Onto oils…
And now we are really trying to look at the brushes from the perspective of using them on an every level in the studio. Could they deliver when it comes to the breadth of mark making we expect of a brush when using oil paint. We often paint on gessoed paper when using oil so this is what did here to match the experience with watercolour and acrylic. We found the synthetic heads perfect for our needs whether it be laying down washy backgrounds or applying paint thick, on broad areas and on parts requiring fine detail.”
Overall the brushes offer an affordable price with excellent performance and more than fulfilled our requirements across our three fields of study and would consider them to be a flexible use default brush that we would turn to on an everyday level. They held up well to repeated cleaning with both water and solvents.
You can keep up to date with KT-LAB: An Art Expedition Project by visiting lab.keelertornero.com
Discover the full range of I Love Art Synthetic Mongoose brushes online and in-store!
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