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Message
Posted
I'm a product design student and I have been designing storage solutions for paint brushes. As I'm sure you know all too well, when paint brushes are stored upright in water or turpentine the bristles can be damaged beyond repair. My solution is to suspend the paintbrushes in liquid prolonging the lifespan of brushes and saving you money. I would be very grateful if you were to give me feedback on wheather this is a good idea and perhaps even share your ideas on how things could be improved, if you'd be interested in buying such an item and at what price?
Some early illustrations of the concept.
I'm considering using clamps or clips closer to the bristles to minimise the risk of damage when inserted.
My other concept is to make magnetic paintbrushes that would stick to a stand in the same way as knives to a magnetic knife block.
All feedback very much appreciated.
Thanks,
Gareth
I'm considering using clamps or clips closer to the bristles to minimise the risk of damage when inserted.
My other concept is to make magnetic paintbrushes that would stick to a stand in the same way as knives to a magnetic knife block.
All feedback very much appreciated.
Thanks,
Gareth
Posted
Well an interesting topic, although I personally, as primarily an oil painter, don’t have any issues with storage.
You won’t find many artists dropping their brushes into any liquid, water or turps/white spirit and leaving them to soak, we just don’t do that, they are too valuable.
You should always clean your brushes after a painting session, dry them and lay them flat. We don’t tend, in the main, to leave them soaking for any length of time, it doesn’t do them any good at all. Some may do of course.
Forget designing brushes with magnets attached, that’s a non-starter!
We all have our favourite brands of brush, mine are Rosemary & Co.
So, good luck but for me there isn’t a problem, but that’s me, others may come up with some suggestions.
I don’t recall seeing anything on the market, which generally means there isn’t a problem!
Saying that, I have seen something with coils extending from a container. Presumably the brushes get held in these whilst sitting in the liquid.
Someone else may know more about these.
Posted
Well, you can sell anything to artists in search of a new bit of kit.... And indeed, many have. To be less apparently sarcastic ('cause I didn't really mean to be, it just comes naturally to me) - there is already a variety of brush-holders/cleaners; yours would work with watercolour brushes, most of which tend to be within a certain size; oil painters and acrylic painters tend to use a wider variety of brushes, i.e. bigger, with greater diameter handles. So you'd need a wider variety of holes through which to push the brush.
Rembrandt used a wooden box, with an angled base: the handles were rested in the shallow part, the brush-ends lay in a small pool of oil - so they'd be ready for use the next day. In the USA, someone has developed this idea on a very limited basis - it's something you could make yourself, if you were any good at woodwork (or metalwork), but I'm notoriously not: so might well go for something similar were you to produce it.
In short - my advice to you would be that the above contraption is of some interest, but make sure you aren't duplicating an item that, in one way or another, is already available; you could refine it perhaps by making it easier to insert the brushes, e.g. handle through the hole rather than bristles first, with the danger of breaking some off or damaging them; a bit of extra weight would be useful, and a metal device would offer that - but up goes the cost; you don't want a device that was all too easy to knock over and have oil or water flooding your table-top. And scour artists' materials catalogues - see if you can find a device that could be improved, or one that really needs to be invented. I don't have that sort of mind, but it looks as though you might have.
Posted
Thanks Robert and Stan your replies are very helpful in building a picture of how I could improve the product. I think the magnet brushes may be too ambitious in having to manufacture a brush that could compete with existing manufacturers. Maybe a thin metal sleeve wouldn't greatly effect the handling of a brush that would enable a magnet solution? Or use the Ferrule for this purpose?
The other could be a mechanical solution that would hold brushes vertical in oil when needed and rotated between 45 and 90 degrees when dry storage is preferable. I agree with the need for a more bottom heavy design that would ensure stability.
Thanks,
Gareth
Posted
One further quick thought - I use a bit of plastic double-glazing frame (hard to describe - see my e-book on Amazon Kindle! There are pictures!) to hold brushes which I've blotted off, or basic-cleaned, as it were, to stop them rolling away or being dropped; it's extremely unsophisticated, and it doesn't keep the brushes in oil or water, but I have found it very useful to hold brushes until I'm ready to use them again. I doubt there's a huge market for this, partly because we've all come to our own method of dealing with these little problems and are probably fairly happy with it: but that's the sort of thing you might want to think about - a convenient, reasonably low-cost device which meets a need, for which nothing ready-made is easily available. All artists want, more than anything else, to just get on with the painting - anything that helps us with this, gets things tidily out of the way until needed, has got to be worth thinking about and may get us to spend some money.
The other obvious thing, for painters in most media, is storage of paint tubes - my oils are in a big wooden box; my acrylics are partly in the drawers of a bureau, and partly in a couple of hard plastic cases, which originally held papers for housing conferences; my watercolours are, frankly, all over the place, gouache likewise; I've got cigar boxes full of pencils, pens, pen-holders, old whiskey-bottle containers for my brushes, I have Linseed oil, varnish, bodied oil, Turps for special occasions, acrylic mediums, stuffed into a bureau. I have, in short, very limited space: many of us have. If you really want to get your inventing muscle working, look to convenient storage of materials: something that'll enable us to find just what we're looking for when we want it, instead of desperately trying to remember where the hell we put our carbon pencils or conté crayons when the urge to create is upon us, we know just what we want to use, but can't damn' well find it.
This rough sketch may jog someone's memory. Made of metal. Come on chaps, help me out here! anyone else seen this contraption?
Posted
Yes, Alan, you're not going mad. You went mad years ago, tee hee (sorry: gin and tonic has been consumed).
These devices are readily available, even if you can't find them just now. As a note of caution - while I think this has been available for a good thirty years or even longer, I've never felt any need to invest in one; which is why I say, find a REAL need; a gap in the market; something we all really need even if we don't know it yet. There are many things that would be quite useful to have available to us, but what you want is something we didn't know we needed until you provided it.
If I could do that myself, by the way - I surely would!
Posted
An interesting read. Brushes are less of a problem for me as I use watercolor and gouache. After washing in water I stand them in a mug, thus far I've had no problems. The few times I've tried oils and acrylics, caring for the brushes has been a more protracted process. I've come across several ingenious solutions, usually when I'm not looking for them.
Here's one that has a Heath-Robinson appeal to me, should I ever need it...
