How to Care for Miniature Brushes

The three things that kill brushes

A brush does not wear out evenly. It dies from one of three specific causes, and all three are habits rather than bad luck. Fix these and the question of which brush to buy becomes much less important.

1. Paint in the ferrule

The ferrule is the metal collar holding the bristles. Paint that gets into the base of the bristles and cures there forces the hairs apart permanently. Because a point is the sum of correctly-positioned hairs, a brush splayed from the root never comes back.

This is the cause of most dead brushes, and the reason is usually upstream of the brush: unthinned paint will not travel to the tip, so the painter pushes more of the brush into the paint to get color onto the model. The real fix is thinning the paint.

2. Standing in water

A brush left bristle-down in a water pot for an hour comes out bent. Worse, water wicks up into the ferrule and softens the adhesive holding the bundle, which loosens it permanently.

Lay brushes flat on the desk between colors. It takes no longer and it costs nothing.

3. Drybrushing with the wrong brush

Drybrushing is deliberate abrasion — dry bristles scrubbed across a hard surface under pressure. It will destroy a sable point in a single session. Use a brush you have already retired, or a purpose-made stiff one. See drybrushes.

The same applies to metallics: metallic flake is far larger than pigment and lodges in scaled natural hair where it cannot be rinsed out. Keep a dedicated synthetic for metals.

The thirty-second routine

At the end of every session, per brush:

1. Rinse in clean, cool water. Not hot — hot softens the ferrule adhesive.
2. Work a light lather of brush soap into the bristles, right down to the ferrule. Gently; you are lifting paint out, not scrubbing.
3. Rinse most of the soap out, leaving a trace.
4. Draw the brush to a point between finger and thumb.
5. Lay it flat to dry.

The trace of soap holds the point while it dries, so the brush is pointed next time you pick it up. Rinse it out before painting.

What not to clean a brush with

Can a splayed brush be saved?

If the paint is recent and still soft: sometimes, partly. Repeated gentle soap lathering over several sessions works paint out of the base and the point will improve. Be patient and do not scrub.

If the paint has fully cured: no. The hairs have been held apart while the paint hardened and that is now their shape.

If the hair is brittle from solvent: no. Natural hair that has lost its oils breaks rather than bends, and there is no restoring it.

A brush at that point is still useful: it is exactly the right shape for drybrushing, or for applying basing glue, or for varnishing. Keep a jar of retired brushes and you will never need to buy a drybrush.

Habits during the session

• Two water pots. One to rinse the worst off, one clean for thinning. Thinning with dirty water is how colors go muddy for no apparent reason.
• Lay the brush flat between colors. Not in the pot, not bristle-down.
• Reshape the tip on a paper towel after each rinse. It takes a second and keeps the point through the session.
• Use a wet palette. Thinned paint on a dry palette dries in ninety seconds, which is why painters end up reloading from the pot with thick paint — the thing that kills brushes. See wet palettes.