Four flat plastic blades with a moulded handle cut through the middle of each, in red, blue, yellow and dark green. What makes them a set rather than four of the same thing is the edge: every blade is cut with a different tooth. One has wide scallops, one has a fine sawtooth, one has square castellated teeth, and one has a close row of points.

The tool works by subtraction, which is the opposite of a brush. Lay wet paint down flat, then drag a toothed edge through it: the teeth lift the paint away in stripes and the surface underneath shows through as clean lines. One pull of the hand gives twenty parallel lines that a brush would take twenty strokes and a steadier hand to produce. Our second photograph shows it directly — a single curved drag of one comb through wet colour, leaving a fan of parallel bands.

Four edges means four different rhythms from the same movement. The wide scallops give broad soft waves for water, cloud or fabric. The fine sawtooth gives dense hair-like lines for grass, fur or brushed metal. The square teeth give a flat-bottomed stripe that reads as planking or tiles. And the row of points gives fine scratched texture — the one for tree bark, rust and rough stone.

It is a technique tool with a wide reach, and it is not only for painting on paper. Faux-wood graining on a repainted cupboard door is done with exactly this edge; acrylic pouring artists use one to comb a poured surface into feathers; gelli-plate printers use the flat edge as a squeegee; and it works in soft clay and air-dry dough as readily as in paint. In a school art room a set of four is more use than a lot of the brushes.

The plastic is a genuine advantage here rather than a compromise. A comb has to be dragged hard through thick paint, wiped, and dragged again — steel rusts, card softens and rubber flexes out of shape, while a rigid plastic blade wipes clean under a tap and comes back straight every time.

Rs. 395 for all four, which is under Rs. 100 a tool. Wipe them before the paint sets, because dried acrylic in a fine tooth blunts the line the tooth was cut to make. Cash on Delivery is available across Pakistan.

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