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hi ive been painting for a while now and after my lizardmen and CSM armies ive decided to root out an old brettonian army ive had laying around and decided to make it look a bit special and so i ask the questions:

1. Best way to free hand
2. what is the best high detail/ free hand brush?

I think free handing something nice just comes from lots of experience with regular picture-painting. I've tried it and I'm no good. Probably a very fine brush with very short bristles would be best...

Yeah, definitely a short bristled brush and some experience would help. What I do before I freehand (albeit poorly), I try to paint it on the inside flaps of the box that it comes in to see how achievable it is.

There are a whole raft of tutorials here. Not affliliated with the site but they have pretty much combed the entire internet for them and indexed them in one place

The suggestions I have seen for brushes are natural hair is better than synthetic. Article on brush choice

My advice is be patient. I have just started to do freehand (on SM banners and Tau sept symbols) and the first few are just plain awful i'll admit. But after a few it gets better.

Also the best thing to do with free hand is start with simple shape e.g. i did a banner for my chapain and it had a skull on it so i started with 3 circles and a small rectangle that i slowly painted over to for the main skull, the two eyes, and a row of teeth. It takes a lot of time and a good fine brush.

being able to freehand has a lot to do with your regular drawing and painting skills.
if your a really good illustrator you will be able to do some great freehanding once you've gotten used to applying that skill to miniatures.

if you cant draw or paint very wel, i wouldnt try freehanding for a while, but practice a lot on paper first

yeah i totally suck at free hand but the way i have seen it done and then replicated to a good level is to first come up with a design on paper, make it nice nd large and easy to draw, preferably something simple and single tone to start. then begin scaling it down in size, then scale some more nd more nd more untill you are drawing your design at the tiny level it needs to be for the mini.
this will help you get used to drawing it so that you can paint it must easier on the model and get the size correct.

but it will take alot of practice unless you are a good artist where this sort of stuff comes a little easier since your more used to it.

as for brushes, i like to go for something a little harder for such tiny articulate detail work, and to get a hard brush/tip, you need as others have said, a short bristle. lets say for instance a kolinsky type short bristle .000 should be great for this. Personally however i prefer a synthetic short bristle .0 perhaps or .00 short bristle style, i like the synthetics for the fact they they are stiffer then the natural hair brushes and i like that for this type of work (not that i actually do it very often or to any decent standard). but thats a personal prefrence sort of thing.

hope this helped, and get stuck in to the amazign links already posted.

Freehand is much easier than you think if you know how to go about it.
I've got a handful of articles that might help get you started.
These are tutorials type posts:
http://fromthewarp.blogspot.com/search/label/drawing

And here are all of my freehand type posts (a wider category with some examples):
http://fromthewarp.blogspot.com/search/label/freehand

As far as a brush, I use a Raphael 8404 Size 0 for all of my freehand work. I won't use anything else.
Hope this helps some.

And as a side note, I've got a post going up next week about how to break down into shapes and paint skulls (to look like the Forge World style skulls)