taking the day or three off for solstice, getting brushes and stuff ready for being idle
if I’m working every day, all I do is wipe down my brushes with regular turpentine and maybe plain veg oil at the end of the night and forget about it. If you’re using oil brushes every day, they don’t have a chance to dry out.
Since I’m taking a few days off for Solstice, I need to actually clean my brushes!
there are good and fancy soaps for this. I just use oil-breaker dish detergent. this is a generic brand, but blue dawn works pretty well.
again, there’s fancy and better suited soaps for this, but I use the cheapest bar soap for ‘oily skin’. I use the dish soap to get most paint and solvent off, then use this to really scrub all the way up to the base where the bristles attach. then I rinse it all out.
I scrub pretty well. I don’t do this often so I try to get way up into it.
I really dry the water out, squeeze em in a paper towel. I want them dry now.
plain,cheap vegetable oil. I dip them into it.
Then I wipe almost all of it off the brush. I leave them just greasy enough to hold their shape. If you use natural bristles you can use conditioner for this (like you’d use on your hair) but if you’re broke or cheap, this works fine.
before I paint again I’ll use turp to wipe all that oil out of the brushes so it doesn’t end up in the painting. here’s all my stuff tucked in neatly out of the way.
little bonus , thumbnails of things I’m planning to work on soon.
