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- This topic has 5 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 5 years, 9 months ago by ladypainter.
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February 12, 2019 at 12:00 am #469017
A friend borrowed a watercolour set for a weekend workshop and “cleaned” the paints after with paper kitchen towels. Now the paints are full of paper fibres which are not acid free. Could there be a risk that they are permanently destroyed even if I manege to clean them? Any ideas about this?
I did tell her not to clean them but if she would to use a brush.
It is a 36 White Nights set with the fugitive paints swapped for lightfast paints. I have no idea what I was thinking…C
"It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create."
J.M.W. TurnerFebruary 12, 2019 at 1:12 am #781505Gum arabic is already much more acidic than the kitchen towel. Also, I have no idea why paints would need to be cleaned, so don’t quite know how best to do that. However, I do remove the occasional fungus with a stiff brush.
February 12, 2019 at 8:08 am #781507If there are bits of paper towel in the paints, they will just get transferred to your paper and fall off when the paint dries. In the past, when cat hairs got into my pan paints, I ran the whole thing under the faucet.
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https://www.facebook.com/haroldrothartistFebruary 12, 2019 at 12:16 pm #781508Sounds like they use prang water colors with little kids and wanted them to look clean.
Mostly they kind of wasted a bunch of paint onto the paper towels. It really is something you can largely ignore. Mostly it’s going to be a distraction when you are painting – much like when you deal with a hair falling out of your brush, you will have lots of little paper crumbs like that. No it won’t harm anything, it’s just paper, though a crumb might gather water and pigment to it if its on your painting.
To remove, just moisten them with a cheap brush like you would if they got cross contaminated and lift off the pigment/fibers until they look pure again. After you are done take your tube paints and top them off again ( if you use tubes ), but only do this after you are sure they are all gone.
I suggest just doing a pure practice painting, something really hard so you know ahead of time you will throw the painting away, or do swatches, or one of the lessons/tutorials in the forum here. This will get the fibers lurking in your paint onto your work now, so your next painting won’t have that issue, mostly to flush them out of the system.
You might want to get some tweezers handy so you can lift things off of that next painting too.
Brian T Meyer
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February 12, 2019 at 1:14 pm #781509Yes lots of paint was wasted. This is paper fibres that looks more like dust on the paint. My thought was that if these fibres end up in a painting that paper might turn yellow because of these fibres acidity.
Thanks for input. I will try to clean them and waste more paintC
"It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create."
J.M.W. TurnerFebruary 13, 2019 at 9:53 am #781506Don’t be too hard on your friend. You don’t know what it looked like BEFORE they “cleaned” it. Some people slop colors all over one another. Perhaps that’s what the workshop taught. (I’m a “clean paint” person myself.)
Therefore, you might try cleaning the fibers out by using a spray bottle of clean water. Hold the pans near vertical over a sink, spray, and let the water drip off and carry the fibers away. Mop off around the pans by blotting with absorbent tissue.
The fibers can’t be that deep into the paint. You might lose a little, but fibers in a painting don’t look good either.
Of course NOW you remember, “Never loan what you are not willing to lose.”
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