Short tip: Use your own distilled water

If you live in a region like me where tap water can be pretty chalky you can have some problems with thinning your paints because the chalk and other minerals in your water can leave residues on your miniatures. Especially if you thin colors for your airbrush or mix your own glazes. If you are very unlucky it already can cause trouble when you use a wet palette, although I never experienced that before.

Yes, you can overcome this by using a glaze medium or specialized airbrush thinners, but these are somewhat expensive.
Or you switch to distilled water which is in most regions I know of pretty cheap.

But as you know me, I am always in the search for saving money so that I can spend it on more useful projects.
Therefore: if you have a tumbler which collects the water instead of blowing the hot air out, you can get your distilled water for free.

Maybe it is not chemically perfectly cleaned distilled water (I am not sure it is 100% cleaned of all minerals since for that you would have to boil the water) but at least it is WAY more "soft" as in less chalky than before.
Every tumbling will give you 1-2 liters of water, so it would be a waste of just pouring it into the sink. You can also use it if you have a steam iron or as addition to your window cleaner. Or even for your flowers, but then only if you fertilize because, as said, the minerals are already washed out.

But don't drink it! At least be careful with it, because it CAN cause issues because of the osmosis happening in our cells it can drain out too much of the potassium or sodium ions if you don't have a balanced diet.

Hope that tip was somewhat useful for you.


So long,
Paradox0n

Short tip: Care for your brushes!

Damaged brushes

Since I am into painting stuff again (the temperature isn't something around 40°C anymore) I have a really important tip for you guys out there: Care for your brushes!
I could throw four brushes away because they didn't keep their tip anymore. The first picture here shows what can happen if you don't care or just throw your brushes around. OK ok, those here are more than 10 years old by now, but if you paint a lot, this could happen much, much faster.

So my tip is: Give your brushes from time to time some love. Rinse them in clean water, then soap with whatever you have in your reach e.g. shampoo and rinse them again. After that, form a nice tip again and let the bristles dry (best with the tip down so that the water doesn't collect in the ferrule and weakens the glue).

Brush soap

If you want to go a step further, use some special brush soap. They come from different manufacturers. Mine was part of my DaVinci brush set but there is also a special one from "The Masters" which was a long time not so easily to buy in Germany. Only know that from videos on Youtube and everyone seems quite happy with it.

But whatever you do: Curd Soap, Shampoo, special Brush Soap... Show your brushes from time to time some love and clean them :)


So long,
Paradox0n