Watercolour Brushes

I took a little water colour course online and learned some interesting things about paint brushes. The biggest takeaway is how lucky I was to have had access to the best quality at the school board. They were Windsor Newton Kolinski watercolour brushes (cover your eyes, animal lovers – a Kolinski is an unlucky type of Russian weasel, bred or trapped to be killed for its pelt. The tail hairs are used to make artists' paint brushes.)
They were outrageously expensive at the time (and still are) but we had carte blanche to order all we wanted because if a department didn't spend its entire budget in a year, it would be cut back the next. Obscene waste from which we – myself and the illustrative artist – benefitted. I'm embarrassed to confess how badly I treated those brushes – left standing in water, used with acrylic paint (SHAME!!) and often not cleaned properly. I still have a lot of them, some sad and stiff from abuse but a few still very useable. I treat them like gold. (For gold they almost are, the incomplete set below would cost over $500.00 to replace today).