At the brush shop you can buy from pre made brushes or you can give them your brush specifications and they will whip it up for you. In this dark back room there are strings of all sorts of little fluffy tail type things that will eventually be the brush tips. At a guess it could be rabbit, cat, dog, horse or maybe ferret hair.
The shop is a dingy little hole in the wall in a side street with rickety stars up to a spooky attic where the spirits of ancient brush makers live (I am sure) so my photos are quite dark.
These are the bamboo rods that the brush maker uses for the handles of their brushes. Who knows what clever hands will be holding these stems in the future or what masterpieces they will be working on. So much potential!!
The wonderful finished products in their different size categories. These are underglaze brushes as they are for broad strokes of colour and they hold a lot of colour in the fibres.
This is Maggie my friend and interpreter. She is like a pocket sized pixie weighing only 43kgs!!
Here are some more elaborate brushes with red hair and nobly handles! The brushes on the right are in some sort of horn... they look beautiful if I objectify them as an object of art, but they are not very appealing to the animal lover in me.
One of the brush makers gluing the tips into a handle. You can see his workshop is very basic, dark and he is probably as high as a kite from the glue. They use rabbit skin glue.
Another brush makers hands moved so quickly as she glued the tips into the handles that I couldn't get a good picture of her.
Some bigger fluffier brush head waiting to be made into brushes.
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