Painting: I Need Better Stuff

I know my painting skills are reasonable. They've always been okay, but partly through taking the time to learn new techniques and plain old practice, I've improved over the few years. For example, compare this, which was one of the first things I painted when I first started painting again in 2007:



and this, which is the best painting I've done (around June 2009 I think):


One of the things I'm starting to find is that I'm hitting the limit of my tools. Up until very recently I've been using craft paints. I started picking them up because they were cheaper and easier to get my hands on than proper paints. For the most part they've worked fairly well. But now that I know what to look for, I'm starting to see the limitations. The pigment and coverage isn't nearly as good, and they're too globby.

The other thing I'm struggling with are my brushes. Back when I first started painting when I was 11 or 12, I got a couple of proper sable brushes. Despite all the use and abuse they've had, they're still better than any of the new brushes I have now. I currently don't have a sable brush that isn't starting to fray out, which makes doing fine detail work extremely difficult.

This all became painfully clear to me last night when I tried to paint some gems. The basic idea is this: paint with the base colour, go over one side with a darker version, the opposite side with a lighter version. You finish up with a touch of white (or almost white). Here's some examples if that wasn't clear.

My gems ended up looking like blobs of a flat colour with big raised areas. Which was a lot of effort to go to for an ugly result. The annoying thing about replacing my paint is that it's not cheap - around $4-$5 a pot, and I don't really like the GW paint pots. But the results are so much better...