Brush Cleaning and Care
To clean your brushes, liners, scumblers and
blenders, first get the excess paint off by swirling the blenders
on a clean
paper towel. Gently pinch the excess paint out of the liner and scumblers.
If you have left over
transparentizing medium work a little into the liner and scumblers then pinch wipe excess out to give them a
jump on the cleaning
process. Never put the medium in your blenders.
Take your brushes to your sink, run the water
to be room temperature. Use plain bar
soap, Ivory or Pure and Natural are
great. Do not use soaps with lanolins or creams,
we don't use brush
cleaners because we don't want the brushes to get "noodly" (if
that's a word) or
over conditioned that is why we want plain, no-additive soaps. You
want to
get the soap wet, wet the brush and "shampoo" the brushes on the bar of
soap.
Be gentle. Shampoo, rinse, repeat until no color comes out of your brush.
For the scumblers and liner keep the
brush slightly tilted
and gently use a back and forth action, never pounce!
You will note that the scumble brush will not be white like
new, ever again! That's fine. As long as no paint is
coming out of it when you rub it on the soap while running
water over it. Rinse well.
For the blenders use a
swirl or "hoola" action on the soap. Again, never pounce the
brush this is very bad for the bristles and will significantly shorten the life
of your brush.
Make sure you are extra gentle when washing your #8 or smaller blender.
Not as much paint will come out of
your blenders if you swirled on a regular basis
during the rouging process, but again shampoo until the brush rinses clean.
Lay your brushes flat on a dry paper towel to
dry. Don't put your brushes in any type of
container until they are good
and dry.
We don't use turpentine with our
technique because we don't use any drying agents in our
paints or anything else that would make it necessary to use turpentine as a
cleaner. All art
oil paint is soap and water clean up unless you use anything other than what we
use.
It's great isn't it?