How to Clean Your Brush Tub

This is going to be a first in a little series of posts focusing on how to clean your face painting supplies.  Keeping your kit clean is not only important for your client's perception of your safety and hygiene practices, but also for extending the life of your tools!

So, for our first installment of cleaning tips, we'll start with our brush tub!!

I absolutely love my brush tub, and ever since the first time I used it, I've been unable to go back to a regular cup of water.  We have two styles of brush tub's...Loew-Cornell's Brush Tub and Brush Tub II. The little ridges on the bottom are so fantastic for cleaning the paint out of your bristles....yet they can be a bear to clean themselves!  Here's how I do it.

Get yourself some of these wipes...Lysol or Clorox wipes work great.  And no, I do not use these types of wipes on kids' faces!  I only use these for cleaning objects.  ;-)

After giving it a good rinse with water, wipe down the outsides and the larger surfaces inside with a wipe.  I find that these wipes have gotten every stain out of my tub for years.  Of course it may depend on the type of paint you use, but I use Kyrolan, Paradise, TAG, Global, and Wolfe.

Once you wipe off all of the larger, flat surfaces, it's time to tackle the corners and ridges.  Find a brush with a skinny handle.  If you have one with a pointed tip on the end, like this one of my Loew-Cornell 7000C series brushes with a nice, sharp, pointed, acrylic handle:

Lay the handle of your brush on the wipe, and wrap the wipe around the brush handle.

Now, use the brush handle to push the wipe down between each of the ridges.  The sharp point on these brush handles gets into every corner of the tub and easily cleans off the paint when positioned at the right angle!  Move the wipe around as you go so you continually get a cleaner area of the wipe.

Once you get all the pain out, give the tub a good rinse, as you may have loosened up some more paint that will rinse out.  I like to use my kitchen sprayer and shoot it right into the ridges.  This not only removes more paint, but it's also important to remove the cleaning chemicals that are on the wipes, so they don't end up in your brush rinse water.

Aaah, much better!!  Ready for the next gig! :-)