Brush cleaning

I don’t con­sider myself to be any kind of expert on brushes. I use mostly nat­ural hair bris­tle brushes and syn­thetic sables (I’m too rough on nat­ural sables for them to be cost-effective for most pur­pose). When paint­ing, I try to keep the paint at the end of the brush, away from the fer­rule. Once there’s a notice­able amount of paint in the fer­rule, the brush will prob­a­bly stop hold­ing its shape.

I clean bris­tles by wip­ing on a cloth, then wash­ing in a linseed-based brush soap (the excel­lent “Ugly Dog” soap from Stu­dio Prod­ucts). It’s impor­tant to keep wash­ing, very thor­oughly, until all the paint is com­pletely gone.

With syn­thetic sables, I use Ivory Soap (a white hand soap with­out much in the way of per­fumes or other addi­tives). Once clean, sable rounds can be “pointed” back to shape by smack­ing them lightly against a hard surface.

Noth­ing sophis­ti­cated, but it seems to work for me.