Cleaning Paintings Made Easy

Cleaning paintings is such a good way to make your works of art more beautiful and appealing to the eyes of its viewers. However, there are a lot of questions lingering in your minds on how to do this correctly. This is because for some artists cleaning paintings may result to making the painting look bad! Some parts would get destroyed, colors may scatter and a bunch of other nasty stuff that we as artists wouldn’t want to happen!

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There are a lot of things that can make a painting dirty but this one is the common cause of it. You might be going along painting your painting fine then all of a sudden you notice there’s a spot in your painting that just doesn’t look right and it looks dirty!

There are normally three things that cause that and the first is you’re putting the wrong temperature piece of paint in a spot where it should be another temperature. So in other words if it’s in a warm area, like in a shadow area on a warm object, for example like an orange or pear or something like that or on a face and the shadow should be warm but you come in with a piece of cool which is just going to make it look dirty because it’s not the appropriate color.

That’s one of the first and most common ways that something looks dirty. Especially in portraits or even in a still life if it’s the wrong temperature. It normally goes this way as it occurs where the piece of paint should be warm and you mistakenly have something cool there that will make it look dirty so this is the first thing that you really must check first.

The second thing is that it will make it look dirty as if you go over and over and over on the same brush stroke what happens is the other paint that is on the brush, as well as paint that maybe underneath the that brush stroke, begins all to mix and before you know it becomes kind of mashed together and you get these dirty areas if you will because we started to introduce compliments into it. So, try not to go over and over and over the brush strokes and licking them down because that will also lead to dirty looking areas. Instead pick up a nice piece of paint like this and make maybe one brush strokes or maybe two brush strokes then wipe your brush then go from there and that’s how you keep your paint clean.

Now, there’s another way that you can do this, another way that you can dirty up your paint. Let’s say that you’ve been painting and you’ve got all these different colors and you’re mixing in your turpentine trying to clean your brush all the time.

Well, what happens is when you do that, when your mixing in your turpentine, lets put some other colors here and let’s see if you can even wipe it off, we still have that fragment of paint in your turpentine. Then you wipe off, you grab another color, and you wipe off and you swirl it in your turpentine. So what happens is you know that brush looks pretty clean but as soon as I push it down, you’ll see all these other colors, here’s white paint, as soon as I push it down you’ll see all of these other colors come mashing out into the paint. You see how this white paint and all of these other colors here makes you unable to control all the colors which then makes the painting look dirty. So, there’s a couple of solutions for that.

First, wipe off your brush instead of dipping it into your turpentine and what happens is when you dip your brush into the turpentine it gets wet and all these paint up here gets smeared around and it can very easily come down and contaminate the rest of the paint. Especially when you’re mashing the brush down don’t do that either, that’s the second part: “Don’t mash the brush down”. Always think about painting with the upper which is the last one-third of the brush. Don’t try to paint with the whole thing. Instead of making a brush stroke where we mash it down and get all that going but instead with nice delicate brush strokes with only the tip of the brush, and go from one color of paint, like now I can pick up some white and I can have beautiful strokes with that but as soon as I mash down look how it all gets contaminated.

I can even go from white paint to red paint back to another color and have it not affected because I came with the tip of the brush. Right? Now I’ve got that red on there and come back and pick up some white but I’m still going to be fine because I’m using the tip of the brush. Don’t mash down when you paint only paint with the tip which is the last one-third of the brush. Secondly, of it looks like it’s dirty then its probably either too cool or too warm. Change the color temperature and don’t mash it down because that’s the last, that’s how you get all that dirty messy turpentine paint in there. You don’t even need turpentine when you paint. In fact turpentine’s the most hazardous thing you have in your studio. Not necessarily because it’s the most hazardous itself but because when it’s open it’s always evaporating, you’re always breathing it you don’t want to do that.

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