Miniatures depend on 4 things – quality of the figure, skills of the painter, the paints they use and the brushes. The first three are worthy of other posts, but it’s brushes I want to talk about. For a long time, the well known and very good Winsor Newton brand of brushes have been my Go-To brush, but lately, I’ve become impressed with another brand – Kalish’s Finest Brushes.
Winsor Newton’s are awesome brushes, but they are fairly expensive. Last I checked on Amazon, a size 0 brush runs about $13.29 for Prime customers. So, OK, you pay for quality and my size 0, one of my main brushes, has held up pretty well. Unfortunately, my size 1 and size 2 Winsor Newton’s have not, even with careful cleaning and taking care of them.
A search on The Miniatures Page had turned up an interesting recommendation about this really Geocities-looking website called “Kaslih’s Finest.” Apparently, these brushes, made with kolinsky sable, are manufactured in Ireland and then imported to the States. And, they are half the price of WN brushes! So, I bought a size 2 and size 1, to see how they worked. And for the past 6 months, I’ve put them to the test.
I’m really pleased by these brushes! They keep an amazing tip, they work just as well as the WN brushes and at half the price, a real bargain! After 6 months, I’ve had no deterioration of the tip or shape. They do sometimes “puff out” after painting for awhile without a cleaning, as versus the WNs simply just losing a pointed shape. A quick cleaning and they’re back in shape.
I just ordered a 000 (3/0) and a 10/0 and after 2 weeks, they seem to have the same quality.
