Paint Maintenance

Artist Nina Weiss shows us how she cares for her tubes of paint. After you’ve invested in nice, pristine paint tubes, you may find that after you’ve used them for a couple of weeks, they start to look well loved and well used. You’ll want to get as much as you can out of your paint tubes, so Nina has some suggestions for how to do just that.

You will see the paint creeping up onto the neck as well as onto and into the cap of the tube. When this happens and it’s left to build up, the cap will no longer fit on the tube because acrylic paint gets very, very hard when it dries. Nina suggests that after you’ve cleaned your brushes for the day, you should wipe down the neck of the paint tube and inside the cap to get the dried gunk that is there. If the paint is left to dry completely and build up and the lid no longer fits on your tube, even taping it shut will not save it from drying out, making you lose your squeezeability of your paint.

Using a tube-wringer or toothpaste wringer, you can squeeze or roll the tube from the bottom, and you will be able to push all of the paint to the top of the tube so that it is easier to squeeze out. You can also hand-squeeze and roll the paint up.

Nina prefers to use tubes instead of tubs because the tubes keep the paint pure and unadulterated. Sometimes you have to double dip when using acrylics out of a tub, so it can get contaminated with other colors.

So with the ease of tubes over tubs, be sure to keep your paints clean with their right caps on the right colors, and squeeze from the bottom to get every last drop.