Cleaning Oil Paint Brushes and Washing Brushes

Painting is a process that involves steps from the beginning you apply paint up to the last step which is cleaning oil paint brushes. Now the next thing I want to talk about is washing your brushes. A little turpentine holder is something you carry with you when you go out painting in the field or whenever you take a class and you want to carry turpentine with you. Now I don’t very much use turpentine myself because I don’t want to have to deal with that delusion of painting myself.

What you do is just after you got your brush you swirl it around in your turpentine you take this and you wipe off all the paint on your brush. Then you just swirl it around your turpentine and you wipe it off again then you swirl it back around in your turpentine again and then lay it on your palette or somewhere for an hour and the reason that’s important is that it allows the turpentine up into the ferrule to dissolve the paint that’s stuck up in there.

Then after an hour or half an hour you can tell that it is up you’ll come back out, you wipe it off like cleaning oil paint brushes, swirl it around your turpentine again then you wipe it off. That’s about as clean as you’re going to get it with your turpentine. Then, if you’re the one that wants to get it really clean you can try to use this product that I like that’s called fast orange hand cleaner and its fast orange smooth. It’s an orange derivative I think it’s completely biodegradable it smells good. Here is how you use fast orange to clean your brush.

So then all you do is you take your brush and you dip it in here and you get some of that then you put it in the palm of your hand then you just scrub it and all the remaining pigment will come out at that point. Then after you’ve scrubbed it good you’ll also have some pigment on it then what you do is you take the brush, grab the tip and you just kind of like figurate it, what that does is it forces this cleaner up into the ferrule and gets all that chunky stuff out that you’ve had up in there, and then you will get the brush as clean as possible.

Then what you do at this point is you just rinse it out with warm water. So, pretend I rinsed it off with warm water and then you shape it back to the shape you want that brush to be and lay it flat to dry. That’s all there is to washing your brushes but a lot of people don’t know how to do that so I wanted to cover that real quickly because this is very important it doesn’t only lengthen the life of your brush but it also helps you save a lot from buying brushes every time you start a new painting so that is the process in cleaning oil paint brushes. Watch more Painting Videos/DVDs and get good at oil painting today!