14th Grand Company

Another quick tip for painting: using brush soap to clean your brushes.

I picked up this tip from the manager of my local GW store. I had been having trouble with my brushes getting stiff and clogged. I know I should be washing my brushes with soap and water after each session but sometimes I just don’t want to be bothered or don’t have the time.

That is where this little dish of soap comes in handy: simple dip the brush in the water pot, wipe it across the soap a few time and rinse it again. While using this method I haven’t had any problems with dried paint in my brush and in fact older brushes cleaned up so well with this, they were actually usable again.

I picked up my soap at a local art supply shop but I’m sure any bar of soap could work, this is just in a handy, closable case.

Although I’m trying hard to finish 1k of my traitor guard by the end of the month I thought I would also share some of the painting tips and tricks I often use.

Today’s Tip: The magic eraser brush.

Whenever I’m painting I always have two brushes out: the one I’m using and another to erase. The need for the second brush arises because I don’t like to do touch up painting and my hands shake a bit. To solve both of these problems I have a second, clean brush always on hand that I can quickly wet and “erase” any spots of paint I put on the wrong spot.

This technique is not completely fail proof but it usually removes enough paint to make it unnoticeable. The trick is to wipe the paint away as soon as possible with a wet brush. If you wait to long or use a dry brush the paint will no longer come off easily. I prefer to use a large, stiff brush for this, such as the medium dry brush, because it both springs into the cracks a bit better and grabs the edges harder than softer brushes.

For my traitor guard I have used this technique many times to remove spots of orange on metal parts or metal on skin areas (though the metal paints often leave a touch of aluminum shavings no matter how hard you try). Because of this I have had to do nearly no touch up.