Removing Paint from Clothes and Surfaces

It's inevitable no matter how clean you try to stay while you're painting, you're gonna end up with something. Like this, it just, it happens and it always seems to be the brightest and most chromatic colors that just spread throughout the studio whenever this sort of thing happens. So what do we do? Well, we have some options. It's not something to be thrown away.

We can absolutely get this clean, of course, depending on the type of fabric, but most artists who are painting in their studio aren't wearing the nicest clothes that they have because they know that this is always going to be a possibility. So here is the trick. It's dish soap. What you're gonna do is. Blot up any excess.

You don't want to wipe because that's going to just get the paint more into the fibers, and of course, the sooner you can catch these mistakes, the better you're gonna be. Because the more it dries, the harder it's gonna be to get out. OK. And then you're gonna grab a little dish soap, just put it right on there. It's really great, um, for.

oil paints, especially because the dish soap breaks down the polymers that bind the oil and the pigment. And so I'm just gonna kind of rub that in a little bit. You can see that it's starting to lift. Grab some warm water. You can give it a rinse.

And this might take a couple tries to get it all clean. You can see it's still there. That's OK. We're gonna give it another round. We'll give it a little bit of an agitation here to really work that soap into the fabric.

We're almost there. I can still kind of see it. That pink really likes to hold on. It always seems to be pink or red. Orange is a big one too.

Those are the ones whenever you're using them, those seem to be the ones that tend to travel on you. You can see just how pink that water turned. Kind of blotted a little bit. Let's give it one more quick round. And of course, after this, if you can get it into the washing machine.

And that will help kind of get any remaining residue and soap out of your clothes. And then we'll rinse. And see how we did here. OK. Let's see, it looks pretty clean to me.

We'll blot it a little bit and see if any pigment is coming up. That's pretty clean. So that is a really great trick. You don't have to throw away your clothes, you can just clean them real quick. But for paint around the studio, um, what I like to use is baby wipes.

It doesn't matter the brand, but baby wipes have some sort of magical properties in them that they will pick up paint from all sorts of different surfaces. They're also really great for like charcoal dust, just a quick wipe and it picks it all up really quickly and, you know, they come in big packs, little packs, whatever, so they're great for travel and, you know, you can just always have them on hand to keep things around the studio and around your person. They're also great for you know, cleaning hands as well, um, keep them clean, keep yourself clean, keep your environment clean, and you are good to go.