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How to use make up brushes for blending inks – Pros and Cons – by Khyati Kothari

Hello everyone,
As an artist and crafter, there are always some products that catch my eye, not all the cool products released the entire year would stay with me when we reach next year, but then there are few inventions or ideas that are stuck through you. Distress inks were one such product that got me started to my crafting journey, and I have my Pinterest board filled with tons an tons of inspirations on how to use them to create a scene. However to my dismay, I was never able to do what these designers were able to do, sometimes the paper was incorrect, sometimes my hand was a bit heavy-handed making this product which started as my favourite to be nothing but stress.
Then came along the videos on the life changing brushes and makeup brushes where people used them and were able to get perfect blends without a lot of effort; and I thought, meh not gonna work as always. However, I was pleasantly surprised that it indeed worked and gave me beautiful results that I always wanted. 
So I made a video series on how I use these brushes and I thought I would share my honest feedback with you on these brushes.
How to use make up brushes for blending inks - Pros and Cons - by Khyati Kothari 1

Now I got 2 sets of the pack of 10 brushes and these worked perfectly for me, however, the smaller brushes in this set are not that useful. They can be used when you have to stencil on your card or you need to use it on small areas (I will show you this in my video as well).

So I got 2 different types of brushes to start off with, images and links added below. Images were taken from amazon India.
You can either buy a pack of 10/ pack of 5 but I would suggest you invest in a pack of 10 as you get more number of bigger brushes in those.
How to use make up brushes for blending inks - Pros and Cons - by Khyati Kothari 2

How to use make up brushes for blending inks - Pros and Cons - by Khyati Kothari 3
The other blending brushes that I got also worked however I could not control the flow of inks on my page, it felt more like a soft paintbrush using which I can paint and not control any ink blending.
Hope I could explain why I did not like them.
How to use make up brushes for blending inks - Pros and Cons - by Khyati Kothari 4
Now what I did was I only took the larger, medium and smaller brushes for my blending. The extremely small ones I have kept separate for when I need them for stencil etc.
I took a small heart punch and punched out different colour families that I need and I assigned one colour family per brush – So one for teal, one for greens, one for blues, one for violets, one for orange so on and so forth. So below is how my brushes look like –
How to use make up brushes for blending inks - Pros and Cons - by Khyati Kothari 5
On how these works I have 3 cards to share along with videos where I share a demo of all the sized brushes and the other kind brushes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGnxlBtiKW4

Video –

Another card where I demo both the types of brushes –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSl9D4aiEeE
Video –
And a 3rd card where I blend a rainbow background because that is what got me interested in distress inks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2_8puGBH54&t=12s
Video –
 Now since the demo is out of the way, coming to my honest opinions and how to take care of the brushes, the limitations of brushes, etc.
1) These brushes are definitely worth the price and I think the makeup ones are really good for blending, I won’t be able to comment on branded ones as I don’t use them.
2) I have never washed these brushes and I don’t plan to wash them as the inks are easily removed by rubbing it on paper. I think washing will add to wear and tear to these brushes and since these are fairly inexpensive I plan to keep one per colour family.
3) You cannot combine the same brush for distress inks and distress oxides as the brushes then behave differently (I already tried on one), this I think is because the ink bases are different. Distress oxides I personally felt are more oil-based than distress inks which are water-based, hence you will need to keep your brushes separate. 
4) When it comes to storage, being in India, it may catch dust hence instead of showcasing them on a stand, I would suggest storing them in a makeup pouch, etc.
5) Honest opinions – I think I have used all the blending tools that were out there including the square blending tool that came first to the round tool and then the small blending daubers and none of them were as good as these brushes. The only con with these brushes is that they take time to blend as they pick up, as well as put down less ink so if you wanted heavy ink coverage it may take some time. Overall I love these brushes and I have already de-stashed my other blending tools.
I hope you give these brushes a try, I will link them below for you.
Makeup Blending brushes (pack of 5) – https://amzn.to/2J3RFsR 
Makeup Blending brushes (Pack of 10) – https://amzn.to/2YqDbst 
I personally have 2 packs of 10 and one pack of 5, since not all the brushes are of bigger size. You can decide how many you wish to buy 🙂 
The other kind of makeup brushes I used – https://amzn.to/2FOibED
 Hope today’s post was useful even though it’s super long 🙂
Happy Crafting,
Khyati
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Khyati Kothari

An artist who loves to dabble with Paper, Paints and textures. The resident dreamer at CrafTangles and HNDMD.

4 thoughts on “How to use make up brushes for blending inks – Pros and Cons – by Khyati Kothari”

  1. Avatar

    I second this choice of blending brushes completely.. they are super easy to use and the results are better than any other blending tool.. these brushes are so friendly that even my 7 year daughter has fell in love with distressing.. and she made many distressed stencil backgrounds for teachers day cards for her teachers at school..
    Thanks a lot Khyati for writing up this blogpost.

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