By Danielle Pureifory
There are two basic types of brushes: the fude (pronounced as foo-day)
is a brush whose bristles are full and taper to a very fine point and the
other brush is called hake.(pronounced as hay-kay) 
The hake brush
is a flat, broad brush with tapered bristles,generally used for smooth washes.
A smooth wash is when black ink is thinned with water to create different
shades of gray and applied in a broad manner, rather than in a line. The
higher quality/more expensive brushes are made out of mink hair and the
less expensive brushes are made out of horse or goat hair.
The Sumi ink is a traditional ink used for sumi-e, made from soot, water, and glue: there are two types of ink :yuen-boku which is a warm black ink, made from lampsoot.(produced by burning a type of vegetable oil), and Shoen-boku, a cool and slightly bluish ink made from pine soot.
To make Sumi ink you would need a sumi stick and a suzuri (pronounced
as soo-zoo-ree) A sumi stick is sumi ink compressed into a hard stick, which
when rubbed against a suzuri with a bit of water creates sumi ink.
A suzuri, or ink stone, is a piece of slate which is used to
create the sumi ink when the sumi stick is rubbed with water against it.
Japanese ink paintings are normally done on silk or rice paper.
A bamboo-stroke is shaded on both sides and lifted between segments, and is done with a Hake brush. A bamboo-leaf stroke is produced with a fude brush.