China Craft & Art Supplies

Tips for Cleaning watercolor brushes

After a painting session it can be easy to blow off proper care of your brushes. It is a necessity with other permanent binder paints like oils and acrylics. If you don't clean the brush after your painting session, you lose it.

Watercolor is more forgiving, but over time pigment, dirt, and binder can become embedded where the hair meets the ferrule. This can cause the hairs to spread a bit and your brush point or edge will become less and less useful over time. Let's proceed with cleaning your brushes. It's easy.

You'll need the following:
Dirty Brushes, still damp.
A bar of soap
Ivory has been my soap of choice, but I use anything that seems mild and organic in nature. You're working with hair here so don't condition the hair with lotion laced soaps. Special artist's brush cleaner soaps are available. Don't use any soap with abrasives like pumice.
Paper towels or "work" towels.

Cleaning your watercolor brush step-by-step:

1.Gather your used brushes by a sink, start some warm water running.
2.With open palm in the running water, gently dab and swirl the brush in your palm until the water runs clean.
3.Moisten bar of soap.
4.Take your wet brush and in a gentle circular motion work some soap into the hair.
5.Wet your palm again and repeat the dabbing and swirling motion with the soap charged brush.
6.Rinse and repeat until suds stay white and brush is clean.
7.Do a final rinse to remove all the residual soap.
8.Gently shake, squeeze or dab water out of brush using towels.
9.Reform damp brush hairs to their original shape with your fingers and let them dry on a flat surface such as a dry terrycloth hand towel.

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