Review: da Vinci Maestro Voyage Watercolour Brush

This is the da Vinci Maestro Voyage Watercolour Brush Series 910. This series of brushes come in four sizes, namely 1, 2, 5 and 6.

It's a portable travel pocket watercolour brush. The hair is made of Kolinsky red sable so the quality is top notch. Brush hair is springy, holds its shape and has a sharp tip.

It can hold and discard water well. So you can easily shake the water or paint off before you change colours, or use the dry brush to collect pools of water from your paper.

Besides the sable hair, the other highlight is the design of the brush itself. It's designed like a pen with cap, you can pull off the cap and attach it to the back. Then with the main body, you push back an inner jacket to reveal the brush hair.

When you keep the brush, you pull back the inner jacket to hide the brush hair, and then you cap it back on.

By using the inner jacket to reveal and store the brush hair, you will have less chance of touching the hair, causing it to fray. This is especially so compared to the Da Vinci Maestro Travel Pocket Brush, the one with hard black plastic body. I've no problem with fraying brush hair though as I always try to be as careful as possible.

The cap has a small hole for ventilation. Drying the brush through that hole is slow so you should always dry your brush the normal way whenever possible.

The Maestro Voyage is also slightly longer and thinner than the Maestro Travel and the Cosmotop Spin. As such, the usability is improved somewhat. The smooth metal surface is also nice to hold.

So overall, the Maestro Voyage seems to be the slightly better brush. I hope da Vinci come up with more sizes in the future.

5 out of 5 stars.

Below are some watercolour sketches I made with the brush.

Availability

You can search Dick Blick Art Materials (US) and Jackson's Art (UK).

Jackson's Art Supplies has free international shipping for brush orders above £20.