Making my way to town tomorrow, and the question is should I buy Artist’s turpentine to clean my brushes or is the hardware store variety good enough. I’ve heard rumors that turps can make your work look yellowish. Basically want to be using turpentine to clean brushes of enamels and artist’s oils. For figure painting I plan to use oils with mineral spirits as a thinner along with refined linseed oil to prolong working time. If there are any flaws in my logic please let me know, I can take it!
Artist’s turpentine comes in two broad types. One, actual turpentine, is distilled from pine resin and the other “turpentine substitute” or “mineral turpentine” is a petroleum distillate.
My understanding is that mineral turpentine and mineral spirits are essentially the same thing and may be used interchangably.
I actually use Lacquer Thinner to clean my brushes. I notice that LT will remove more junk from a paint brush and air brush than regular thinner or turp.
I’m in the same camp as PJ in that I use lacquer thinner for all my brush cleaning when using oil based paints. I use artist’s turpentine to thin artist’s oil paints for some of my pin washes.
NOPE! There’s absolutely no difference between the two. I’ve never heard of any such a thing! ALL turpentine is made from petroleum. These are distilled from petroleum byproducts. This is how they cut oil paints. Laquer thinner is too hot! It eats any type of brush made from synthetic products and it eats the glue inside the ferrules - too messy! Just use hardware turpentine - it’s all the same, except turpenoid which is just the denatured version.
Shepard Paine, one of the most respected military miniature sculptors and painters ever, says, in his book on the subject, that there’s no practical difference between turpentine in a 1 oz. bottle bought at an art supply store, and turpentine bought by the gallon at a hardware store. He also says hardware store “paint thinner” does the same things. I’m perfectly content to believe him.
Art supply stores do sell other thinners for oil paints, differentiated mainly by how much they smell. I have a bottle of Winsor and Newton “Oderless.” I don’t have a good sense of smell, but to me it smells distinctly of turpentine - but nowhere near as strongly as the traditional stuff.
Ditto. As a matter of fact, I use LT, regular thinner and Turp from Home Depot or Lowes. I picked up a small red can of the Testor’s thinner at Hobby Lobby to compare and can’t tell the difference in performance between the Testors and HD thinner.
LT is my standard cleaning solvent to remove any type of paint from my air brushes. The only issue that can come up is if you soak the ab body in LT, then the rear seals can be damaged. If I soak the body in LT, then I only submerge the tip/ front part only, not the entire body.
Thanks plastic, I’ve read about how LT can eat the seals, so basically I’d just run LT through the airbrush between colors, and only soak parts that have no seals, and brush and q-tip the rest.
You can replace seals. However, if you don’t have you shouldn’t. I soak my AIRBRUSH in mineral spirits, but I use lacquer thinner only with cotton swabs to clean with. I don’t use lacquer thinner with paint brushes. As I said before it eats the paint of the brush handle, and the glue that holds the ferrules. You should only use lacquer thinner with paint equipment that doesn’t have rubber, or silicone seals. Or only use on the parts that don’t have any soft seals of any kind in them.
I only clean and not soak the wristles of my brushes in LT, then use a paper towel to lightly dry them. Most are over 10 to 25 years old and are in near brand new condition.