In this video I attempt to make my own brushes from hair extensions. I Made a few paint brushes and two Urushi lacquer brushes. Patreon: / urituchman Instagram: / urituchman
Not Japanese but I'm living here. Those are pretty good kanji for your first attempt (better than mine honestly). BTW, the "legs" that that you noticed (⺣) is actually a compressed version of the "fire" kanji (⽕). It seems that they're often found in kanji for those that are known to be very swift. Like: birds, fish, horses, bears, clever RU-vidrs who make their own brushes... that kind of thing. ;)
My father used to make brushes for our ceramics workshop, the best hair he found came from squirrels tails. And he used contact cement to glue them, because is waterproof once dry. The process of making a good brush is an art on itself but a good handmade brush is a wonderful tool.
Squirrel hair is pretty good as long as you don't need it to stay a specific shape once damp, it tends to fluff out when it gets wet so not ideal for water based paints (lovely for sign writing with leaded paints though), horse/pony hair tends to have the same problem. Ox hair is a good all rounder if you want to go down the organic route but synthetics really have come a long way and they're pretty hard to beat performance/cost wise.
many providers will not write real hair on their labels. because most of the time the extensions are sourced from asia, and thus when imported to europe they will have to go through customs. and real hair has a higher customs tariff percentage than synthetic hair. so many providers will try their hardest to make real hair seem like synthetic hair - we've even had one company hand-write little cards they included in their packages saying "hi, we wrote synthetic hair so you don't have to pay such high customs fees, but please be assured that it's real hair as advertised" (yes, it was rather awkward for all involved).
Uri is a Japanese word, it means melon: 瓜! You could also go for 鵜鯉 (u and ri), meaning cormorant and koi carp, which is not ideal, but all things considered, close enough to pigeon and fish!! Otherwise for a first try you did fine! (the "legs" are actually the squished version of 火, which means fire - why do so many animals have fire in their name, you ask? Well, why not.)
Its appearance in animals is unrelated to fire: "A graphically similar but etymologically unrelated bottom component is used in several animal characters, notably 馬 (“horse”), 鳥 (“bird”), 烏 (“black, dark (was crow)”), 魚 (“fish”), indicating variously legs, claws, or fin." But it's correct that the radicalized 火 can be simplified to either 大, ⺣, or 一.
I think breaking down his name into it's meaning and then working from there is a better method. Uri means light in Hebrew, and Tuchman is a German occupational name meaning textile merchant. I think the most appropriate translation would be 布屋 光, or Nunoya Hikari. Most people with foreign names should probably just use katakana however. It's not so messy or confusing as transliterating two words of different origins from cultures that have different naming conventions than the target language.
Even if they're not perfect, they're yours and individual. And at the end of the day, you made them work so job done 😉 Was good to see you at Maker's Central!
My friend makes and sells her own paints, collecting plants, flowers and insects from nature. I'm always amazed at the transformation of color from the plant to the paint as it gets dried and ground and oil is blended in. The blues especially. Your Japanese brushes look great.
Your name (Uri) can be transliterated into kanji, either as 宇梨, 宇理, 宇里, or 瓜. (wouldn't recommend the last one lol) you can also just write it in just hiragana or katakana (うり, ウリ) The kanji was decent enough for first time, though 鳥 got a bit squashed to the side. edit: some more possible kanji for your name, pretty much all of them are using their on'yomi pronunciation. U: 宇 羽 優 雨 Ri: 梨 理 里 鯉 離
@@urituchmanpigeon of course, you can search them in jisho.org and the you can see the meaning on the right side of the screen. for example 羽鯉 can be read as "winged/feathered koi". generally speaking, kanji always carry meaning where as hiragana and katakana don't carry meaning, just pronunciation.
Great work as usual Uri!! Using tools that you made yourself is really satisfying. Can’t wait for the next video. How did you start being such a great inventor? Could you do a Q and A video or maybe on how you learned so much. It would be very interesting. Thank you fir all your work a teaching. I want to build my own paint brushes now.
I like that each video is literally about something different even if you're not quite sure what you're supposed to do. Makes it more interesting I think 😁
I feel like we both have the same aspirations in life Uri. Every time you post a new video, it's a project I've already tackled or one that I'm wanting to do. Good luck on the pigments. I'd suggest lapis and other natural stones, they make the most beautiful pigments in my opinion. Keep up the good work man. I'ma big fan of this channel
I've seen brushes made in the medieval way, by using feathers and pull strands of that feather through a cut off piece of its tubular shaft. Saw it on a documentary. Never done it yet, but looked very plausible.
One time i was babysitting some kids and brought my acrylic paints to paint their faces but i forgot a paint brush so i just cut off a piece of my own hair and taped it to a pencil with electric tape. it worked surprisingly well.... This is a liiiiiitttttle more involved.
Excellent video uri, always a pleasure watching you craft some amazing instruments. I honestly thought at first you would be using your own hair anyways.
When trimming my squirrel hair pinstripe brushes I would use liquid dish soap really heavy on the hair and let it dry over night. The next day I could trim it the way I wanted and then just wash it out. I don't know if that is the proper way, but it worked for me. Great video. I may need to make some brushes myself in the future.
When you said all you had on hand was a snip of your own I died laughing 🤣🤣 dude seriously you are full of comedy and knowledge. I can picture di vinvci being the exact same. I LOVE your content. Although I do none of this I'm just here for entertainment.
I made some brushes with different kind of hair, some harder in the middle, softer on the outside for ex. They were mostly from old brushes, that I didn't care destroying. That's a fun thing to do, and can open unexpected opportunities once you paint!
[Subscribed] Very interesting video. To really appreciate/understand tools and what we expect from them, there can be no better way than to try making them. I think this series will be most inciteful.
Fishing fly tiers use a tool called a "hair stacker". It's just a tube that fits into another blind tube. You just stuff the hair in, bump it a few times on a table, and all the points of your hair are lined up. You can pull the open tube out, grab your hair in a clump, and brush out all the short ones. Just do a youtube search on "fly tying hair stacking" and you'll see how it works.
Look forward to the paint and canvas projects. A nice watercolor paper would be an interesting project too although it might be a bit tough to accomplish all that's needed for that kind of specialty paper. Inks would be a neat project too especially printing inks that can be expensive. I can't think of anything else on my wish list... Incidentally, I tried silk screen printing using hand crafted frames and screen made from inexpensive shear curtains bought at a dollar store. The thread count is not as tight as my normal commercial screens but it worked beautifully and they cleaned up easily too. Best wishes and love your projects!
Could you show how to make a porcelain pallete? i don't know if you work with watercolor, but porcelain is perfect type of surface to mix your colors into and if it has those pans/wells you can just let the paint there and already mixed tube paint and etc, and i would love to see someone making just to know what i should watch out for, like how thick and thin it should be, how to glaze it and fire it, all that stuff.
Oh my ,i had to subscribe. I wish I'd seen your video before i purchased my 12 yr old an ISABEY brush for $118 she will now be making brushes, Thanks to your video❤❤. You have sure a vibrant personality
Nice video. I'm trying to teach myself urushi lacquer painting. So I thought this would be interesting, and it was. The only missed opportunity was that a hake brush can have hair, usually human hair, go the full length of the brush, so that when the bristles get worn, they can just trim the wood back as in a pencil and re-shape the hair and you have a new brush again. But still an awesome video. 👍😊
Great video, Uri. Very entertaining, and interesting to see how to make things that you tend to take for granted. I wonder whether going to a local stable and ask them whether you can have some hair would work - although I have no idea whether it would work with any horse hair. The amount you can brush out of it as the winter fur goes is enormous, bur probably not high art supply material. Thanks for sharing!
I agree with you that it is not so much of the economic side of making the brushes (far, far cheaper to buy ready made brushes); rather, it is the ability to customise things to your specific requirements. Mostly, I just improve on things bought from the shops. Case in point, I am painting one side of the house but during the Covid-19 lockdown in NZ (late Mar ~ late April 2020), I cannot go out to buy a cutting brush for trims, etc. Great video - thank you.
Make an easel with the metal etching and some mechanical doodad/apparatus . And that would tie it all together for you art and engraving plus woodworking... not a bad idea for you Uri
As a vice president in charge of quality control and training, I have seen the start to finish of hundreds and hundreds of brushes. We used Winsor Newton camel hair 000's to retouch negatives. We used hairspray on the ones that needed fixed then using a 20x magnifier trimmed the hair with superfine cuticle scissors. After their trim we washed them and used a swirl motion to bring the tip under control and then froze them. We would trade for the more used ones because the retouching could be a spot as large as a poppy seed and as small as a piece of dust. The older the brush the sparcer the hair. This technique was practiced over the span of 62 years.
Hi Uri, if you want to try different hair, a source to investigate is materials to make fishing flies. I used to fly fishing times ago and to make flies it is common to use silk wire, feather and ...hair, from different furs. Now I stopped to fly fishing but I guess materials are still on market. A quick inquery on a serach engine will work. One comment on the brushes you made: the look good and, as you said: they works pretty well even if not perfect. My only dubt is regarding the paint: if it is not water or oil based, it should dissolve sinthetic bristle (nitro, turpetine or acetone based paint). Another good job!
I believe for a hake brush I believe you want to use the natural ends of the hair as they get much more supple and fine to the tip. This improves the smoothness of the application. There is a technique to achieve this with brushes for mokuhanga where they burn the trimmed ends and then rub vigorously on ray skin to split the ends, simulating the natural taper of hair.
Many Hanzi are descended from pictographs that gradually became abstracted and standardized into components called radicals. The radical "灬" is a simplification of a fish's fins, horse's legs, ect and also can mean the character is related to fire or merely a phonetic add-on
The trick to making brushes is you do not cut the bristles after the brush is made. You line up the tips of the bristles and cut the BACK end of the bundle and mount it that way.
I think you could get the laquer brushes to thin out by either cuting them at an angle with a razor blade while clamped between two boards, or by stacking layers of hair in the same length fixed to a piece of tape, with every layer set back a bit (looking like a straw roof,essientaly). Also, you might be able to get the hair to stand straighter in your other brushes if you take a bundle, tie a string around it in the middle, and pull the hair into the brass tube so it is pressed in a U-shape (thats the way bristles traditionally are fixed in things like nail brushes)
To shape the hair to be more uniform, I'd suggest using a hair straightener/flat iron; you can get a cheap one online for less than 10 USD. To taper the hair for the Japanese brushes, there are these little comb-razor things that I think are intended for eyebrows? A doll customizer that I watch uses them to cut and style doll hair, and I think that would do exactly what you need.
I can see re-cycling commercial brush handles and re-making them with hair of your own choice when a commercial brush wears out/gets damaged. Cuts the cost of a custom brush.
