How to Clean Oil Paint Off Paintbrushes

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Carlos Navarro, I'm an artist here in Miami, Florida. In this clip I'm going to tell you how to clean paint off paintbrushes. As an artist, you know how difficult and expensive it is to go to a store to pickup a paintbrush for a new painting when you may have 10 or 20 paintbrushes at home which has been sitting there basically getting harder and harder. If it's a brush that you haven't used for a while for example, a larger brush, they and you haven't really taken care of it, they usually sit and the paint gets harder and harder. Turpentine is a good substance to take off paint but we're not really talking about cleaning a brush with turpentine. My suggestion is if you have a brush that is really, really old, you pick up some acetone, you clean every single bit of paint you can from that brush, let the brush sit overnight in some water, lukewarm water with some dish washing soap. Believe it or not, dish washing soap softens the brush and makes it more manageable, more malleable so that the following day you can actually use it. This brush has been left overnight and as you can see, it's pretty much perfectly clean and you can actually continue to clean it and it's a pretty good brush. The only problem sometimes is if it's an old brush, look at the layers, the bristles on this, they're kind of thick, it wasn't like this all the time it was actually a thinner brush, the edges were thinner, the edges were sharper and over time paintbrushes have a tendency to just spread out and they're not as good as they used to be. So my suggestion is if you've got a really old brush, you can get the paint off but for the most part it's just not going to be worth it. You're not going to get the same quality of brush and you're also not going to get a brush that's going to last very much longer so you might as well throw it out, but if it can be saved, by all means save it. This is Carlos Navarro, thank you for watching."