Shop Tips: How To Properly Clean Your Paint Brushes

7 thoughts on “Shop Tips: How To Properly Clean Your Paint Brushes”

1. My biggest failing… usually dump them in a jar of scruffy water. Then they dry out and stick together.

   I Will take note. Thanks.

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2. i don’t know how much this affects different kinds of paint, but i’ve had suboptimal things happen when cleaning ink out of brushes with a lot of soap. without a toooooooon of rinsing with water, that is.

   a favourite ink brush (very fine hair, rather densely packed) built up soapy residue that ended up impeding ink flow and how well the brush stored ink. with the very fine hair, it took quite a long time rinsing with lukewarm water to get it back into shape again.

   switching to japanese or chinese calligraphy ink alleviated the problem a lot, but might not work for all applications, since it’s not waterproof.

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3. I only use acrylic paints, so soap and water is all I use. With my sable brushes I never soak them and try to clean them immediately after use to keep them from frizzing.

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4. I always have had issues with the crimped/glued bristle area, in that it is the hardest to get really clean.. Any tips for the base of the bristles ?

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5. Don’t dip the paint brush into the paint pot. Ideally you should have a clean white palette and use your paintbrush to get paint from there. You are far less likely to dip the brush in past the metal ferrule (metal bit). Getting paint up in the ferrule (base) of the brush is detrimental to your brush, over time this will cause the bristles to splay out and not come to a tip.

   As covered in their video, don’t leave brushes in a bottle/jar of cleaning fluid. It doesn’t take too long before they kind of develop a ‘memory’, and the tip of the brush will then have a bend. This will obviously effect pointed brushes more than broad brushes, but it can still effect them as well.

   When putting your paint brushes away, if they came with a cap (typically a plastic tube), put that back on after cleaning. With pointed brushes, I tend to twirl them in the palm of my hand along one of my palm lines while still wet. This helps get them to a point.

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6. This is really good stuff. Please keep the shop tips coming!

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7. So, I’ve used The Masters Brush cleaner and Preserver on brushes to bring them back to life. Got it initially for oil paint brushes, but works well to revive all the brushes we’ve tried it on so far. Saves money on having to buy new brushes after leaving them sitting in cleaners for way too long

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