I have a quick studio tip to share with you today. I am a really clean painter. Getting paint everywhere bugs me. I don’t paint with gloves or an apron and I rarely get paint on my clothes. That’s not bragging, I just work better when I keep my paints and where they go organized. Sometimes I wonder if I am not missing out on the full studio experience by not flinging paint everywhere and getting it in my beard and all over my clothes! 🙂

Here is a shot of one of my drawers of paint. Some are clean, some are not.

When I would squeeze some paint out of a tube, it seemed like inevitably the tubes would quickly end up looking like this:

Yuck! I’m sorry you had to see that. Those tubes are nasty!

I realized that a large part of the problem was that when I would squeeze paint out of the tube directly onto my palette, some of the paint would get mushed onto the side of the threading at the top of the tube or it wouldn’t be flush with the tube opening and would put excess paint into the cap and it wouldn’t take long for it to accumulate and drip down the tube and onto whatever surface I was storing them. A few years ago I found a little trick that helps me keep my paint tubes clean.

I found that instead of putting the paint directly from the tube onto the palette, I could use a palette knife to cleanly cut the paint from the top of the tube and put it on my palette. It has helped me keep my newer tubes really clean! Here is a little video that I made to show what I do now:

If this isn’t something you already do, I hope that you found this post useful!

Sincerely,

Howard

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