fold foil in half

You have a wonderful mixture of oil paint that you want to save. Or, perhaps you simply have a lot of paint on your palette and you don’t want it to dry up. What to do? The first step is to choose a piece of foil appropriate for the amount of paint you want to store. Fold in half, with the shiny side facing in. More »

Being an artist is not the easiest way to make money; the people who most rely on having their paints in good condition are typically the ones who can least afford waste. Reliable paint storage is not a glamorous topic, but the more serious you are about being an artist, the more important it becomes to do it right.

The screw top paint tube is an important invention and it might seem simple to use, but it is not trivial. Every time paint is removed and the top is screwed back on, a bit of paint will find its way between the plastic top and the metal screw part of the tube. As this paint builds up, and time passes, bad things can happen. There are two basic categories of bad things. One is that the paint builds up in a way that makes it hard to close the tube properly. When this happens, there is the danger that the paint in the tube will dry, as in this photo.

When paint dries in the tube, it is worse than throwing money out of the window. It wastes time, it makes me feel stupid, and I’m stuck with the tube (who knows, maybe there is some good paint in there somewhere). More »

Getting ready to roll brushes for a ride

The oil tray for storing brushes is very useful, but it is not the sort of thing that you would want to take on an airplane. If your brushes are linseed-oil damp and you need to take them someplace, say on a long journey, what should you do?

One solution is to clean the brushes with a non-drying oil, like olive oil, before taking them on a trip. Once you reach your destination, wash them several times with linseed oil, as with cleaning a brush of paint, to remove the non-drying oil. In practice, this is no problem. The greater danger is if you by accident mix up the linseed oil and olive oil and start painting with the latter. To avoid this, mix a small amount of color into the olive oil (maybe phthalo blue or something) to mark it as something different.

The bamboo rolling mat in the photo above is perfect for moving the brushes safely from place to place.