Brushes are one of the most confusing areas of the art supplies market for beginners — too many options, too little guidance on what actually matters, and a very wide range of quality for superficially similar products. In this guide we cut through all of that with a practical, plain English explanation of what you actually need to get started with acrylic painting and how to build your collection from there. We cover the six essential brush shapes and what each one is for, the key difference between Taklon and synthetic hog bristle and when each is appropriate, and a clear guide to the four brush ranges we stock at Craft and Canvas: Pro Arte Acrylix for precise, controlled acrylic work; Pro Arte Bristlene for expressive, textural painting and as a vegan hog hair alternative; Royal and Langnickel Taklon for responsive, affordable all-round use; and PAB Florence, the Florentine brush maker founded in 1911 whose artist brushes represent the finest quality available. Read on, then find the full range in store or at craftandcanvas.co.uk.

Most watercolour painters have a handful of brands they know and trust, and Wallace Seymour is rarely among them — not because the paints are inferior, but because they are deliberately produced in small quantities, supplied only through independent retailers, and never marketed through the mainstream trade. Founded in 2011 by Rebecca Wallace and Pip Seymour, two practising British artists, the company makes the Vintage Watercolours range the way watercolour was made before the industry scaled up and cut corners — traditional and historic mineral pigments, Kordofan Gum Arabic of the highest grade, and genuine Acacia honey from a single Italian estate. The colour range includes pigments you simply cannot buy elsewhere: finite stocks of historic colours unavailable since the 1980s, earth pigments hand-dug from specific English quarries, and rare minerals with granulation qualities that synthetic pigments cannot replicate. We stock the full Series A, B, and C tube range at Craft and Canvas in Hebden Bridge. Read on for the full story, then come in and find out more.

One of the most compelling things about acrylic paint is its ability to create genuine physical texture — not just the impression of texture through careful brushwork, but raised, three-dimensional surfaces that you can actually feel. This quality is unique among common painting mediums, and it opens up creative possibilities that watercolour, gouache, and most drawing media simply cannot offer. In this guide we cover six accessible methods for creating texture in acrylic painting, from the boldest approaches — impasto with a palette knife, modelling paste built up before painting begins — to the more subtle: dry brushing for surface grain, sgraffito scratched into wet paint, sand and found materials mixed into the paint, and deliberate gesso texturing of the ground. We also explain why texture matters compositionally, how to combine methods for the most interesting results, and which subjects and styles benefit most from textured treatment. We stock Wallace Seymour impasto gels, modelling paste, and gesso alongside the full acrylic paint range at Craft and Canvas — read on, then find everything you need in store or at craftandcanvas.co.uk.