VS 2010 : When And Where To Create Brushes (and There Graphics Tools)

For some reason I could never get over the look of my application, and the Microsoft controls together. Just never looked right. Nor were the controls exactly what I needed. By creating controls I can pretty much custom fit them for my application, and I love it.My question is with drawing these controls. I have 12 of them now in my current project, so I would like to make them all as efficient as possible. The biggest set back to most of them is the drawing can be a little extensive, or at least to a point where they could be more efficient. At the moment, under each paint event I have the brushes created by using blocks and then the drawing happens within them(I create all brushes first, then do the drawing, vice versa with disposing them). My question however came up when I was creating my most recent control, a SimpleList.

I experimented to see(though I'm not sure how exactly to track performance) but instead of recreating the brushes and pens etc in the paint event, I put them at the top so they're only made once, and destroyed once, rather being made and destroyed every time my control paints. My common sense tells me this is a better way of going about this but my experience can't back that up. is this the way I should be going about user drawn controls?, is there any limitations to this?(like would it be okay if I only had a limited number of brushes etc) and is the performance even that greatly impacted by making these changes that it's worth my while?