Guide to Borderlands Brushes

Edit Aug. 2021: These have gone through an upgrade!

So excited to finally be sharing these beauties with you! I decided to design my own set of brushes — a reflection my most commonly used brushes + I threw in a special brush that I’ve never seen before in the cookie decorating community!

Let’s take a look below at how I utilize these brushes. All my brushes are soft enough to mold around whatever they are painting. Made with wood, aluminum and synthetic fibers.

Buy these food safe brushes here 

1. Powder Brush
   • My absolute favorite for dusting fondant molds with corn starch prior to molding
   • Amazing for dry dusting large areas of icing
   • Also works well wet– as a larger watercolor brush
2. Flat Brush
   • Perfect for drawing wider lines on dry icing — think stripes or turn it flat on its side for thin lines
3. Angled Brush
   • Amazing for brush embroidery work
4. Dot Tool
   • Probably my pride of the set. I was tired of wearing out the tips of round brushes as I was applying cheeks, and I couldn’t get clean-ish polka dots on dry icing without pulling out the airbrush and stencils
5. Fan Brush
   • A go-to for making gradient streaks
6. Short Buff Brush
   • My preferred dry dusting tool. Holds onto pigment well, short bristles for great control but also soft enough to move around edges to deposit pigment nicely.
7. Flat Detail Brush
   • Surprisingly, my favorite for painting detail and lines despite its deceptive “flat” shape. I turn it to the side and use it on lines– if you get the right amount of “paint” on the brush, there is less chance the paint will get underneath the lines you’re trying to paint
   • Great for dipping into thick paint and splattering onto cookies
8. Medium Detail Brush
   • Great for painting details!
   • Wonderful for watercolor
9. Fine Detail Brush
   • Designed for tiny details such as adding paint to dots of icing, or thin line

Hope this gave you some great ideas for how to use these brushes! There are endless uses for brushes and honestly if you find another way, that’s great! Don’t limit yourself.  My 100% candid opinion on these is that they are a great basic soft bristle brush set for all levels of cookiers, priced to reflect that; however, if you start dabbling in more serious painting, I highly recommend you invest in another set of high quality brushes geared toward actual painting.

Wash brushes in mild detergent before first use. Pat dry with a paper towel and allow to fully dry FLAT — this will particularly help with getting any kinks out of the fan brush since bristles are soft. Make sure to maintain your brushes by cleaning them after each use to extend their life.

Grab yourself a Cleaning Pad to make cleanup a breeze!

Brush Cleaning Pad

WARNING: Not compatible with Poppy Paints– something about that product completely destroys the soft bristles on our brushes. 

Some examples of work with our brushes:

• Dry dusting with Short Buff Brush using The Sugar Art dusts dry onto dry cookies– adds dimension to pumpkin, truck, car (windshield and edges) and sunflowers
• Sunflowers are all fondant painted with The Sugar Art elite dusts and with flat detail brush or you can also use the medium detail brush
• Dots on pumpkin created with Golden Halo mixed with vodka and dotted on with the dot tool
• Wafer paper leaves on the wreath and plaque were painted with flat brush

You can buy our brushes in our shop HERE.

I will edit this post from time-time as I demo more ways to use these brushes!