Brush Love

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If you own as many brushes as I, it may be because you've not been looking after them properly, and need to replace them more than you should.  So a quick post for something I hadn't really considered before but have found to be far more useful than the old stand-by.

I like many of you used dish soap (AKA washing up liquid, here in the U of K) to clean my brushes, and whilst it was fairly effective, it was quite harsh, and required a fair bit of abrasion to get the paint shifting.  But I just switched over to actual painters soap, and, it is far better.

Mmmmm.  Nice.

Now this really does the job.  I've found the soap can really shift paint, but also - with acrylics anyway - can be used mid painting to keep a brush in shape and free of clogging, without even effecting the paint.  My approach now is to paint with the soap bloc by my wet palette and not only regularly rinsing the brush, but also stoking it on the soap every few minutes.  Also in between any change of shade.  On top of cleaning detergents the soap also contains the essential oils your brushes need.  Its a lot less unpleasant for them, and for me.  I'd almost go as far as to say moistening brushes in your mouth becomes a sweet experience; if you know what I mean.

And finally you can get the stuff all over the place, every art shop sells it, and at under a fiver a block it strikes me as very reasonably priced.  Check your search engine of choice for details.

Alongside this though, I have recently taken to another sensible adjustment to the painting process, one taken from my airbrushing in a sense.  The wet palette makes mixing paints in bulk with wires, sticks etc impractical, so I tended to use the brush I was painting with instead, a terrible habit.  Not so bad for blending, but murderous for initial mixing, so instead I have reemployed an old brush to live permanently in the palette as a mixing brush.  It still gets regular cleaning, but all it is there for is to do the initial mix that proved so harsh for my brushes.

As for the outcomes of these efforts, well, the next few days will present a little product.

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