Painting with a brush:

It's easy and it's fast. If you use our Fabric Brushes, it washes and dries just fine.

The thing that you always have to remember when you're painting on fabric – is that the paint MUST PENETRATE the material. If it doesn't, it will wash off. When you paint with our ball-point tip you are literally rolling the paint down into the material. Then when you use your Fiber Blender, very gently, you are making sure that the paint is penetrating even better.

You can use a brush to paint on just about anything. That paint pretty much stays on the surface of whatever you are painting on. That's okay if you are painting on glass, canvas, ceramics, etc. When you are painting like that you can use a very soft brush or a firm brush, whatever you need to get the finished results that you want.

There are a lot of different brushes out there but most of them are not good for painting on all materials.

When you paint on fabric that is going to be worn and washed, you have to make sure that that next step is done as well. You must penetrate the material with the paint to make it washable. To do that you need a nice stiff brush that will push the paint down into the fibers. That's the kind of brush that Cameo carries – Fabric Brushes – so called because they are the brushes that you need to work on fabric and have the fabric be washable after you are done and the paint is dry.

You can do all kinds of techniques with our brushes on material. A lot of the same techniques that you use on canvas or glass will work well on material, as long as you are using our brushes.

One of the techniques that Rene McDonough, from Florida, taught me over the phone was the ‘one stroke' painting. Of course, I probably don't do it the way she does, but teaching that kind of technique over the phone is hard. If you use this technique on material, with our Fabric Brushes, it works great. You have to remember to push the paint into the fabric when you put the paint down, but that comes quickly as you use the technique.

When you do ‘one stroke' painting you always put the same color of paint on the same corner of the brush. So if you have 125 on one corner and 110 on the other corner, you continue to fill the brush the same each time that you need more paint. When you do your ‘one stroke' onto the material, you always have the same color go down the same way. For instance, if you are doing a cloud or a snow man, the dark side would always be doing the outside of the stroke and the lighter side would always be doing the inside of the stroke.

You should have a scrap piece of material or a paper towel sitting next to you when you are doing painting with a brush. When you finish ‘one stroke' and go to re-fill your brush you might want to wipe the brush with off on your rag or paper towel to keep the (2) two colors from melding together on your brush.

When you are just using (2) colors (double filling) to fill your paint brush and are not worried about necessarily keeping those colors pure, you don't have to clean your brush in-between uses. Doing the inside of the cloud, for instance, you want to take your double-loaded brush and literally swirl it around inside the cloud to get different colors that form the paint into a cloud. You might even want to use a couple of brushes that you are double-loading to get more of a variety of colors inside your design.

If you want to do a running river quickly, you can double-load your brush and sweep it back and forth in the direction that the river is running. That way you are getting a couple of colors of water in there at once.

You can stipple with your brushes, either with (1) one color or with (2) colors. Just get the colors you want on the very tips of the brush and then tap the tips of the brush straight down on the design for a totally different look. This can be a good look for light shadows or highlights.

The smallest brush can be used for small lines. Try wetting down the material a little – then put a streak of paint on with your smallest brush. Interesting effect isn't it? This is great in sky scenes. It gives you that faded look along the edges.

We have (2) two sets of brushes. Each set has (3) three different styles of brushes in them. They are each $10.00. C460 – Fabric Brush Set (3) & C470 – Fabric Brush Set 2 (3)