Another day, another brush! I swear I didn’t put that many in my advent calendar, but my randomizer (my partner) keeps pulling out the brushes.
Today’s pick is a Rosemary Snowdrop synthetic sword liner, size 1/4″. I got it because I had heard that sword liners were as good as riggers for thin lines, but more versatile as they can make thick shapes, too. I keep wanting to like swords & daggers because they sound cool, and some artists (Liz Steel etc) really like them. I’ve never really warmed to them.
This is another low effort day as I didn’t have a ton of time. I played around with the brush and made lines on various scraps of paper. I wasn’t really sure what to do with the brush after all that, so I looked up what’s good to do with a sword liner and found Jackie Garner’s suggestion to paint grass. Indeed, on a closeup of grass, it’s very easy and satisfying to paint thin stems and just slightly increase the pressure to end off with a leaf. The seed heads were pretty easy to paint, too.
I didn’t find that this brush is better than a rigger at horizontal lines; head-to-head, I found the rigger easier to saturate with strong paint (because it’s less floppy) and easier to control. I’d just go for the standard rigger for things like power lines.