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Hi everybody,

I've had a problem where I am getting red pigment dry into the bristles of my paintbrushes that end up getting into the other colors that I use at other times. I *think* that I'm doing a good job of keeping my brushes clean, but I must be doing something wrong. I am rinsing them with a clean water pot, drying them out on a paper towel, and I have tried cleaning with a paintbrush cake of soap. It doesn't seem to be removing the red colors. That red comes off of the bristles very slowly as I get them wet again, which taints the paler colors, and is especially bad in my drybrushes, which is making them useless for drybrushing any other colors. Do any of you recognize this problem and know what to do about it?

I think there's a bit of a misconception about keeping your brushes in good shape; a lot of advice revolves around 'cleaning your brushes properly' with soap and the like after a painting session, but ultimately that's mostly unnecessary; keeping your brushes in good condition is all about not getting paint dried in them in the first place.

When you are painting, you should be 'cleaning' your brush every five minutes, maybe even more often depending on your circumstances. As soon as the paint is getting even a little dry, you should be cleaning off your bristles and putting new paint on your brush.

In this context, by 'cleaning' your brush I mean giving it a good rinse. It's good practice to have more than 1 water pot (I usually use 3, but 2 is perfectly adequate). Keep your water pots as 'clean' and 'dirty' pots; rinse your brush in stages. Start with the dirties water pot, swish your brush around to get most the paint off, then go down to the next cleanest pot, rinse again, then the next cleanest pot, rinse again. You'll notice the 3rd pot of water basically never needs to be changed, as there is so little paint on the brush by the time you are rinsing it a 3rd time. Only takes about 10 seconds, and it will remove almost all of the wet paint in your bristles. The less time the paint has been on your bristles, the easier it will be to remove, there's no harm in over-rinsing, so do it liberally.

If you keep good cleaning practices throughout your painting sessions, there should be no need to clean them with soap after the session. It's worth doing a deep-clean every so often, but really it's all about not letting your brushes get dirty in the first place.

This is just me saying how right shmvo is and adding my 2 cents.



Now for what to do when you do mess up...
I swear by this stuff. It's saved a few of my brushes.


For more seriously caked in stuff try submerging it in something like this for a while and then try it again on the brush soap.


if that doesn't work then it's beyond saving. Some cheap brushes I have I'm not too precious about and throw them out if they get too nasty, but if you want to make a brush last then you have to treat it right.



Also One last thing. Are you using enamel paint?
That stuff does nasty things to brushes if you're not careful and using the right thinners and cleaners.
I wrecked one of my brushes with a similar story to yours using Red enamel paint...
Acrylic is so much nicer to brushes.

Yep, Masters brush soap really helps get paint out of a brush. Even after I think I got it clean with water I can run a brush through Masters and get even more paint out.

Does it get the red/ grey stains of the bristles too?

I have a couple of dry brushes that are stained but not paint clogged

Red is one of the annoying colours as it tends to stain more than others.

As above, clean the brush every 5 mins or so.
This ensures nothing really dries on the brush while painting.

Along the same lines, I tend to keep separate brushes for metallics too as the flecks don’t always wash out 100%.
I can wash the brush non stop while painting then again at the end and still have the odd fleck of metallic here and there.

 Rybrook wrote:
Does it get the red/ grey stains of the bristles too?

I have a couple of dry brushes that are stained but not paint clogged

My brushes come out much cleaner but it is still possible for chemical pigments to stain the bristles over time.

I use the soap dish shown above. It doesn't seem to help that much.

Red seems particularly bad about it, and it is worst on the drybrushes. I was hoping I could dunk the tips of the brushes a chemical for a few days but if it's glue that holds the bristles into the ferrule then I'm not sure that would work.

Alternatively I could just keep "red" brushes seperate.

joewarhost wrote:
I was hoping I could dunk the tips of the brushes a chemical for a few days.

Submerge it in this stuff for 5-10mins.





Not sure what type of stuff we're dealing with here if masters brush soap isn't helping too much. Sometimes it takes a little bit of effort to work stuck on stuff, but it should work with what you're describing.

I've recovered brushes I thought were lost by swirling them in lacquer thinner. I guess I still continue to think that's a last resort, but I've been surprised how much life I've got out of brushes I recovered that way.