How to Make Your Brushes Last Longer in Miniature Painting

you ever seen a video that talks about making your paint brushes look like this but in reality they're like this to make sure that our paint brushes don't do this and do this we need to maintain them so I'm here to talk about keeping your stuff in good shape there is a lot of money to be spent in paint brushes especially if you're going for the kalinski Sable brushes costing you 15 a pop practically and if you get a few of them you know you're getting set back we want to try and keep our brushes in as best a shape as possible because the longer we keep them in good shape sure the more we can use them the sharper the point of it is the more precise we can be well then we also don't have to spend more money just to buy the same product again so we can have something that's functional and the question is of course how do we do that well let's start with the preemptive stuff and then we'll work our way to the actual cleaning of the thing or brushes have a tip a belly and then where the bristles meet the actual sort of handle where this is held by the ferrule and the one thing that we want to avoid generally is acrylic paint getting up to the ferrule Paulie acrylic paint is quite harsh on our brushes and partly because acrylic paints they Harden and what they'll do is they'll Harden in the bristles causing the bristles themselves to deform meaning that the brush will lose its point or it will change shape and then we can no longer properly use it so we want to avoid having acrylic paint jammed up into the ferrule so how can we avoid doing that well one way is whenever we picking up paint or mixing paint with our paintbrush we never really do it anywhere past the halfway point we generally always want to stay much closer to the tip of the brush the further we bring it upwards into the body of the brush or into the belly of the brush the more likely that the acrylic pigment paint medium will get closer to the ferrules which means it's more likely to cause a problem because it's harder to clean closer to the ferrule okay conceptually they're absolutely you can think about it you're like oh yeah that absolutely works I'm going to just say something here for practicality's sake the belly is the position that holds the most amount of liquid and that's why a lot of painters love a big belly in their paintbrush and because of that when we're picking up the pigment of paint it's gonna get in here anyway so you can be absolutely super careful and say I only ever get to the tip but that's really an unlikely circumstance that you're going to be able to do we want it to hold because it means that it doesn't dry so quickly there are a lot of reasons but that's a big one so a thing we could also do because these brushes the kalinsky brushes are more expensive then when we're mixing our paint on the actual wet palette it may be a wise idea to take a not very good brush or a brush that's been heavily used and you don't care about maybe it's one of your synthetic brushes that have no longer got a point anymore like so and use this as your brush to mix things and so then you've got a brush that you don't really care about you don't have to be considerate with every single time that you're going back oh yeah I'm going to mix this color and mix that color and you just don't really care and that's actually very nice now for practical senses as well with this I don't like doing that because I really like picking up oh I've got a brush in my hand I'm using to paint things I don't want to have to put this brush down pick this brush back up mix it back around again pick up the other brush and then do it again that just seems like this needless sense of hand motion and it stops me from painting because I'm like picking up brushes if you can do that it's a great way of keeping your brushes in good Nick but I tend to find that I never do that just practically because I'm just like oh I'm painting grab a bit of paint do a little bit of a mix here and then again go back to it so I'm never ever dropping my brush but you know everyone sort of finds their own path when it comes to that but just keeping the concepts in mind is helpful to making sure that we can have longevity not brushes if you don't switch brushes like myself then all you have to do is just be a bit more conscious a bit more careful with this brush and while you're blending and mixing things you don't want to be stabbing your paint because you can damage the tip of the brush so you generally want to come at the sort of more of a side angle or horizontally and mix them and blend them that way around so you're doing the least amount of like pressing in with the bristles themselves that will at least help it so just something to be aware of well we need to clean our brushes so I have a good friend who is a phenomenal oil painter not that I've taken a whole lot of tips from her but one thing she told me was you need to clean your brush every single time after you finish painting there was no ifs ands or buts to that there was this definitive sentence being said to me saying clean your brush every single time that you use it and I have followed that rule ever since I've learned it I don't paint Let It Go leave my brush aside come back in several hours and pick up that brush again effectively as soon as I have finished painting and I'm thinking hey I am done the first thing I do besides closing the lid on my wet palette is I'll take my brush and I will go and rinse it out and this singular tip the singular action that you are doing here is perhaps one of the most important things you can do in terms of keeping your brushes in the best possible shape for as long as possible firstly a not all brushes are made equally so you can get a bunk brush and it's not always necessarily down to cleaning it that your brush is going to stay in good shape and that's a fact and that sucks and I wish there was some way that I could say hey all you have to do is clean it make it better that's not always true I don't know why people say who who claim that cleaning it is oh that'll turn any brush back to normal again it just does not it's just not the way it works there are plenty of brushes that are absolutely useful from the start and there are brushes that after you've used them a long long time that you can never really bring back no amount of cleaning is gonna get them functional partly because the bristles that we are using get used they get worn and eventually they give and they no longer hold the shape so are objectives as painters is to increase the longevity of our paint brushes for as long as possible so this is how we do it once you're finished with your painting session you immediately take your paint brushes that you're in use and then you go to the same I'll literally open the tap to the slightest amount of water it's a little dribble that's coming out hey I don't want to waste excess water and be I just need a little bit of it at any one time because hey it's a small brush and so we'll take it and then this is where we'll need some soap so there are plenty of companies out there that make brush soap I think any one of them will do however Masters soap or the Masters soap has absolutely done the trick so in this jar here which is 2.5 ounces so it's not that big this one here I have been using for probably two something years and I've just about completely finished using it up so something like this which is about ten dollars really will last you a very long time in painting and if your painting is consistently as I generally am then this is going to last you a couple years which is great what we'll do is we'll have a bit of water we'll rinse our brush off just quickly and then we'll take the brush soap fresh stuff here we want to get our soap to a lather so generally I'll take a bit of the water and I'll rub my finger in a to help soften the soap and B to sort of create a bit of a lather once I have done this I will then take my brush and then I will gently not very vigorously gently take it and twist in the lather that I've created and as I've done this it will pick up the the ladder or get into the bristles and it will sort of Clump around the paint that exists in there and that's great that's what you're looking to do once you've gotten a lot of um lather built into it I will then take my thumb and my forefinger and I will gently pull it out generally with a little bit of a Twist not too aggressively that's kind of the deal here just not very aggressive in any of these things pulling out the paint then I'll rinse it and what I'll do then is I'll rinse and repeat I'll go back to the thing pull it get more lather built back into it try and catch more of that paint sometimes I'll press the ferrule A little bit into it just to make it so that there's um the soap is initially catching right at the feral tip and then I will pull it back out again gently and then rinse and repeat until there is no more paint that I can see and so generally you have to do three full passes at that once you've completed that and you found there's no more paint going on anymore and you've got the last bit of just water left you take it and you will pull for the last time into the lather and then you will gently remove the excess amount of soap leaving the soap in and then using your hand or the back of your hand any part of it give it a twirl to get it back into a nice fine point and once it sits at this nice fine point what will happen now is that the soap will harden and the bristles will now maintain this shape and that's perfect because now it's we're kind of giving memory to the to the actual bristles and saying hey stay in this shape and so until next time it will exactly be this shape and that's just what we want and then when we come back to it the following time that we're painting put a bit of water in it it will completely release and then you're back to painting again and also because you've left a little bit of the lather in there it will also condition the bristles meaning that you're giving more life to them and that's really it that's at the end of the day is the thing that you need to be doing every single time after you've finished painting this tip this active cleaning your brushes is important for all brushes that you have no matter whatever kind of paint that you're really using it's our tool the paintbrush paint is another tool that we're utilize and they get mixed together and we want to keep the tools functional for as long as possible so if you're using any kind of paint I know mainly our hobby is acrylic and maybe a bit of oil or some enamel and things like that we need to be conscious and we just need to clean our brushes every single time that we use them but what if I've got brushes that are in bad shape right now is there anything that I can do to fix them to bring them back to life well are you a doctor sometimes you can sometimes you can make the effort and bring brushes back to life I'm going to start with saying that I have done this successfully but not every single time that I've done it has it been successful so I think just a matter of what's happened to the brush itself and that's not always obvious maybe this paint so deep in the ferrule that you cannot get to it and because you cannot get to it there is no means of truly removing it but there are some things you can try and work with one tool that I use which is again many companies will make some equivalent of it so this is a brush cleaner restore and it's specifically designed for dried acrylic or oil paints and that's great because I have some oils and I mainly use acrylic so I have a tiny little jar of this which strangely has an x on it just telling me not to drink it or anyone else but I generally fill it up with a bit of this stuff in here and what I'll do is I will take my brush I'll sort of open this up and I will just drop it in there I will kind of run the brush along the edge of it hopefully allowing it to you know make sure it captures all of the moisture that it needs and then I will let it sit for a while so what you should do with all of this stuff is a follow the instructions of your brush cleaner stuff with that I then rinse it with water and then I will continue to go back with brush cleaner the brush restorer stuff helps to dissolve or break down the hard acrylic and that can obviously be very important when you've got that sort of um when you've got the acrylic that's built up near the ferrule and so that's what we're trying to do and I have found that sometimes I can bring a brush back to working order but a lot of the time I found that it just never quite does it for me when I paint for the most part I really want a fine tip and I mean I want a fine tip it needs to be pretty bloody Sharp and I will get work with a brush that has lost its point but I'd prefer it when it's got a very fine point and so when a brush loses that particular bit then I'm a bit like okay I will use that brush for my base layerings and various other stuff but for any fine detail work I then stop using them okay you're like well that's all good and dandy Khan that's kolinsky brushes I understand I need to be more careful with them great but what if I'm a synthetic brush user well I'm okay so what happens when you utilize a synthetic brush is something like this will tend to happen on your brush but it's just slightly hooked at the end so the tip has sort of lost its point but it's not just lost its point it's almost changed its angle a bit and it's the dreaded hooked tip if this happens to your brushes instead of throwing them out or using them as just like your like don't throw away brushes or you don't care brushes you can actually repair these some of the time depending on how bad the tip is gone what you need to do is you need to utilize some very hot water so perhaps you boiled some water and let it cool down a little bit you dip the brush into the hot water let it sit for a little while not too long you can do it by hand take it and then again like you would do like the kalinsky perhaps on a Surface because it's quite really quite hot um try and get it back into a regular uh back into a sort of sharp pointed tip and then let it be for a little while and see if it retains its shape because it's synthetic we can be much more harsh with the brushes so that's just a nice little tip to try and keep the tip of your brush in good shape and that only works for synthetic brushes I have made some of my brushes last you know half a year or just a single brush keeping it working you know and some brushes which I've just bought and that have worked a few times have failed in a few weeks and it's not that my brush practices have changed a whole lot so I know just because the way that I use a brush there may be problems with the brush itself hopefully that was helpful hopefully it just gives you the knowledge that you will need just to maintain keep control and have everything go relatively smoothly and so you can focus more on painting [Music]

Channel: Wrath of Minis

Views: 6,893

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Id: JM0e2tpi9bs

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 09 2023