Art Tutorial: How to clean your brushes

I wanted to make this tutorial because, well, to tell you the truth I never, ever, clean my brushes. Yes, I’m that lazy. For the most part it doesn’t really affect my artwork at all, or at least not that I know of because I don’t know what the alternative (clean brushes) can do for me.

But, I figured I could start saving money by cleaning my brushes instead of just buying new ones every time I work on a new painting. Yeah, that gets expensive… so really I just reuse really crappy ones that serve, for the most part, as sticks that I dip in paint and touch on canvas.

Anyway, I dug around for a bit on YouTube and found a few things that people were using to clean their brushes. I should warn oil painters in advance that I use acrylic and I’m not certain how well these techniques will work on oil, though one of the videos a lady uses a chemical that says it works on oil as well, but she was cleaning brushes that used acrylic. So, I haven’t seen any proof of that.

This chemical will apparently solve all my conundrums overnight and makes the job really simple: Brush Cleaner & Restorer.

But it’s not as simple as just soaking them. You do have to do some minor hand cleaning of them after soaking. The following video will help you out: