Wednesday, November 9, 2011

"Butchering Paint Tubes"


Today I finally broke down and butchered my four "empty" paint tubes. Over the past few months, I had wrung them all the way to the shoulder, and squeezed all the paint I could get from them. Looking at the tubes here, you can see I had even squeezed up the shoulder of the tubes before beginning this process. Today I decided to dissect them and scoop out the remaining paint from the shoulders. David Darrow taught me this little trick, using an exacto knife to slice at the shoulder and small palette knife to scoop the paint out. You can see the Cadmium Yellow Light is still in the tube, and the others are all scooped out.
This is the amount of paint I salvaged from my "empty" tubes! I purchase the 150ml tubes from Utrecht, and you can see it's quite a substantial amount of paint saved. Don't worry, I ordered replacement tubes over a month ago. I NEVER run out of paint!

4 comments:

LG Harris said...

What a nice little tip for extending the life of paint! I always try to salvage the paint from the paint trays after I've finished working, so I might try this tip as well now.

Maria Bennett Hock said...

I will steal this idea and start dissecting my tubes also. I had no ideal I was wasting so much paint!

Barbra Joan said...

Debra , You are soooo thrifty !!
Knowing you I'm surprised you haven't painted that 'setup' LOL !

BJ

Debra Bryant said...

LOL Barbra! I must admit, I saved the tubes!

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...