Making a (Digital) Hake Brush - Part 1

The lowly, unsubtle, inexpensive hake brush is one of my favorite traditional watercolor tools. In this post I'll show you how to make a digital version of this wonderful brush in Rebelle.

The traditional brush

I fell in love with this big, flat, goat-hair brush when it was made popular by the English watercolorist Ron Ranson in the 1970's. He used it to paint "fast and loose." For years I used a wide hake for larger paintings and kept a narrow hake with a sawed-off handle in my travel kit.

It's almost impossible to mispronounce this brush's name: whether you call it hockey (like the Canadian national sport), or rhyme it with sake (the Japanese beverage) or cake (the American birthday food), you'll find a bunch of artists who agree with you. (Let's not worry that most of the others will think you're quite wrong.) 

Hake brushes are inexpensive because they usually consist of an unpolished flat wooden handle, slim metal ferrule, and tufts of goat hair sewn in a flat pattern from 1 to 6 inches wide. The bristles are so soft that some acrylic painters use hake brushes as blenders. But they really shine in watercolor landscape painting!

Most watercolorists use the flat side to wet large areas with clear water or to block in light washes of color for skies or foreground fields. Ron Ranson famously painted thicker washes with the edge of his brush.

Creating a digital version

In Rebelle Brush Creator I made a digital version of my beloved hake brush with these parameters:

I use this brush with a light touch, with either a linear or a broad cross-hatching stroke, to lay down an even wash with some grainy character. Here’s the mark it makes when, from left to right, you press lightly at first and gradually increase the pressure:

The top mark is on a textured Rebelle canvas—in this case, the Handmade paper—to highlight the beauty of the brush's mark. The lower mark is on White Simple canvas, which has no texture. 

Continue reading the next post, "Making a (Digital) Hake Brush - Part 2," to understand why I chose each of the parameters above and to see how you might modify the brush in several useful ways.

Free download

I encourage you to try this digital hake brush and adjust it to fit your painting style. It's easy to add brushes to Rebelle: just copy the image below to your computer, and then drag and drop it into the Watercolor brush section of Rebelle (or, use the Import Brush Preset command in the Watercolor brush section).

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Thanks for reading!

I hope that you enjoyed this post and that it inspires you to enjoy digital painting. If you find this post helpful, please share it with your friends. And please send me your insights on digital painting and suggestions for Digital Paint Spot.

Bob Kruschwitz