Why Cleaning Your Brushes is a Waste of Time - Oil Painting Advice

[Music] so if you're an artist painting an oil cleaning your brushes is a complete waste of time and i'll explain to you why the only thing that you know especially if you're going to go and clean your brushes with mineral spirits or even worse soap and water that's only going to remove the oils from the bristles and i'm talking about natural hogs hair bristle brushes synthetic brushes are a different thing but even synthetic brushes it's a complete waste of time to clean your brushes first of all you shouldn't think about brushes as being dirty really they just have the wrong color in them i mean if you come home from the store art store with a brand new brush that's never been used the moment you dip into a few colors now that brush is as dirty or dirty as it as it can be and the only issue there is that you might need to change it from one color to another which is something you do you know any artist as you're working you're always changing from one color to another you know if your brush has got some you know dirty green color in it and you want to make it less green you take a little bit of red and now your brush is shifted toward the right color the one time that it really is an issue and you really have to make sure uh that your brushes are completely um have exactly the color that you want is when you're doing pure colors and what i mean is let's take the first example where you might have a yellow sunflower in the sun and you're going to mix the color for that yellow sunflower and you've got a brush and it's full of say purple paint and you need to which is exact opposite of yellow so it's almost as dirty as it can possibly be if you want to paint a yellow sunflower but if you take that brush pull it through a paper towel and get the vast majority of the purple out of there and then dip into some of your pure yellow paint and especially a really bright yellow paint like the geneva bismuth yellow that we sell which is a very intense yellow and if you take that dirty brush or brush that has purple paint in it and then try to um and you pulled it through a paper towel but then you dip into that yellow and you work your brush into that yellow paint the residual purple in that brush is going to bring down that yellow and take some of the intensity off of it it's still going to be a strong yellow but it's going to be not quite as intense because some of that residual purple that was left in the brush and now when you compare that to a sunflower it still is too strong of a yellow because sunflowers are are strong yellow but they're not nearly as strong as this bright bismuth yellow paint or even you know any strong oil painting intense yellow is going to be stronger than a natural flower yellow so therefore you would have to add even more purple paint to bring that yellow down you know it may not take very much but you'll have to get a little bit more purple and bring that color down so now that it matches the yellow sunflower so therefore we're not really cleaning the brush we're just pushing the color in one direction another there is one time when the cleaning your brush when you really do have to get all the uh other paint out like if you're mixing a really pure color like if you were gonna do a yellow sports car that was painted with this intense yellow then you might you know pick up a brush that has some purple in it work it into the yellow paint and then compare it and it's brought down a little bit so it's not going to be quite as strong a yellow as that intense yellow that this sports car was painted but that's an example of a pure pure color and in that case i'm going to have to work my brush into that yellow paint pull it through a paper towel you know re-dip into the yellow paint and maybe even do that a second time until you finally get pure pure color in that brush so when you're mixing really pure colors that's the one time you need to clean your brush in that pure color so to speak and that's not the brush the paint that you use to clean it with is not throwaway paint you can put that over in your waist pile and use it for you know some other neutral color that you're mixing but the one pure color that i'm always in my students and in most oil painters that are doing realism that you're always using is black and black is made you know if you're using a pure black then it's just only ivory black or mars black or whatever you're using if you're using the black that i use is french ultramarine mixed with burnt umber and when you mix those two the black that you get if it has to be only burnt number and only blue if there's any yellow in it or any white in it or any other color then it's not going to be that pure black so in that case i need to clean my brush with some black paint pull it through a paper towel maybe do that again i mean and if it was a brush that had a lot of white paint in it or a lot of yellow then you're going to have to do that two or three times to clean your brush with the black paint and that's one of the reasons why i reserve brushes and i only use them for black so that i'm not having to constantly clean them okay so what do you do about your brushes drying overnight with paint in them and again if you're using the geneva paint that i sell at genevafineart.com then that paint will stay wet even the burn number for like five days so you're fine but if you if your uh pain is at risk of drying or you're using like a you know another brand burn number that can dry in eight hours or eve overnight very easily in that case you need to put a brush dip in it and we sell brush dip you can make your own it's 98 safflower oil 2 percent clove oil and that clove oil in the safflower oil will keep your brush wet for two weeks i would re-dip your brushes weekly just to make sure but if you're using brush dip it's at the end of the day you finish painting you just take your brushes submerge them in the brush dip set them on a brush holder and they're good for two weeks when you're ready to paint pick up your brush pull it through a paper towel and you're ready to go you never have to clean your brushes and over the long term it's the best thing for your brushes because it keeps oil in the fire in the hairs of the bristles and that's exactly what your uh what is best for your for your brushes all right well thank you so much for watching um if you haven't been to my website genevafineart.com go check that out we're now selling easels again and almost all of our paint we're going to have black black has been sold at and we're going to have that available here in the coming week or so and also brush holders and everything else so thank you guys for watching and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Draw Mix Paint

Views: 143,119

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Id: CIAiC15FfeQ

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 15 2022