How To Clean Paint Brushes

OK. My name is Tom. I work for Aspect Maintenance, a painter and decorator.

I'm just going to explain to you how you would clean various different paints from your brushes. And just good brush care basically. So if you don't want to buy a new brush every time you get them out to paint something.

Things to bear in mind: If you use an oil based paint, for example, something your putting on woodwork like an undercoat or a gloss, you're going to need to clean your brushes in White Spirit. That will separate the paint from the brush like this. Once you've done that, you just need to keep working at it, basically.

So keep clearing the paint from the brush itself. It can sometimes look as though the paint has come away. You've just got to keep going at it, and shake the White Spirit from the brush.

Then maybe put some more White Spirit in it and do it a second time. Otherwise what you'll find is that when you leave the brushes, they tend to go hard. And when you come back to them, you can't use them again.

Another tip you could use, if you were painting quite a bit, is to use one of these, which is just a brush mate. Which basically, all you do is you store your brushes inside. And it has, inside the box, like a sort of paper which releases a vapor constantly.

And you keep the lid on top, and it stops your brushes from going rock solid and becoming, basically, unusable. So if you're going to be doing a lot of painting continuously, you can leave it overnight in that, and it should be ready for you to use the next day. Water based paints, or any emulsion you're doing on a ceiling or a wall, all you need to do is just wash your brushes in water.

So, put them in the sink, take off the excess paint, and keep washing them. You can do it 3 or 4 times before you actually run all the paint out of the brush. Keep shaking out the brush.

And make sure it's completely free of paint before you leave it. Because again, if you come back to it, and it's got paint in it, it's going to go solid, and it's going to be no good to you. You're going to have to throw it away.

So that's basically how you clean brushes. .