Brusho Painting

Last week whilst I was procrastinating over getting some housework done (it’s just far too hot to scrub the bathroom and push the hoover round) I pulled out my Brusho. Following on from my toucan picture last week I was still up for bold, bright colours and I knew that Brusho would offer that.

For those that don’t know, Brusho are pigment powders that react with water. Each colour is a mix of different colour pigments so if you sprinkle some on and spray with water you can get a variegated colour but they can be simply mixed with some water to make a uniform colour. Lots of fun but a huge learning curve – they get messy quickly and the colours can get muddy. For me, part of the joy of them is having this colour variation within one colour (if I wanted a totally flat wash of colour I could use watercolour). Figuring out how much water to add to keep them like this takes some patience.

I was aiming to try a variety of techniques but when I looked at what I had created I realised that I had only really tried two different ways of working with them. Oh well, it means there is more fun to be had another day.

The above pictures are where I drew an outline and then painted each shape with clear water and sprinkled in the colour. I used a paintbrush to carefully move the pigment to the pencil line but being cautious about how much I moved the paint in order to keep the colour variation. I added a little fine liner and white gouache to each one. I think my favourite has to be the cactus, closely followed but the watermelon. That ice-cream though! I adore the bowl (which is the only reason I posted this picture). It made me think of some cool pottery technique but the ice-cream looks bad, as is gone off mouldy bad.

I then moved on to some looser sloshing colour around technique (the word ‘sloshing’ really indicates the skill level here). I painted on clean water mainly to get the power to stick to the paper and sprinkled on the colour. They were then sprayed with more water to help the colours move a little more. The water/seascape type scenes were done in two halves so that I could get a horizon line. The ‘windy tree’ scene was straight up water and power pigments and tipping the paper at various angles until I liked the result. I have used a combination of black ink pen and black Brusho (used like watercolour) for details on these.

I used 200lb watercolour paper for this as I didn’t want to tape it down. I used a lot of water so it did curl but nowhere near as bad as if I had used a thinner paper. Also, just like watercolour the colours will run into each other if they are side by side and both wet. I allowed some drying time inbetween each section.

Hope you all have a lovely week.

Hannah x