For painting with watercolors only soft brushes are suitable. Usually they are made from natural materials, but soft synthetic brushes are gaining popularity recently.
Squirrel brushes
The most popular watercolor brushes are squirrel brushes. They collect water well and then give it away for a long time, which is very important for drawing with watercolors. The correct squirrel brush should be from squirrel tail hair, if it comes from skin hair, its performance will be much worse. When buying a brush, you must definitely test it: dip it in water - the bristles of a good product in a wet form will converge into a thin tip.
Due to the brush converging at the tip, it can be painted with any brushstroke, both large and small parts.
Column brushes
Column brushes are also very popular. The column bristles have a special scaly structure, which allows them to draw more paint and evenly give it to the canvas. At the same time, brushes from the column draw less water than squirrel brushes, therefore it is more convenient for them to draw small details that can spoil excess water. Like squirrel brushes, core brushes should converge at the tip when wet.
Beginning artists can be advised not to buy expensive column brushes, but to replace them with cheaper mixed ones, in such brushes the column bristles are mixed with synthetic bristles.
Synthetic brushes
Modern synthetic materials allow you to make artificial soft brushes, similar in their properties to natural ones. The price of synthetic brushes is much lower, but even the best of them do not provide such quality strokes and recoil of paint as natural ones. Such brushes can be safely chosen by amateur artists.
