Saving your brushes

It happens. Your students are painting. There is water on the table for cleaning brushes. You've demonstrated proper brush care. You've lectured on it. You remind them at the end of the class. But, at the end of the period brushes are left covered in paint. And they are hidden around the room. You won't find some until it's far too late to care for them easily. Even the cheapest brushes aren't something I want to replace every year and it's not just the cheap ones that end up this way. So I've found a way to revive damaged brushes.

Materials

• small crockpot
• Murphy's Oil Soap
• water
• fine toothed comb or Plaid Brush Preserver
• sink
• inexpensive hair conditioner

Fill the crockpot half full of warm water. Plug it in and set on the lowest setting. Add a squirt of Murphy's Oil Soap. Put your ruined brushes in the crockpot bristles first. Let them soak for a few hours or overnight (depending on the amount of paint in the bristles). Remove the brushes from the crockpot and place them on a paper towel or newspaper. One at a time, hold the brushes under a stream of water in the sink. Rub the brushes firmly in your palm. Acrylic paint will soften and rubberize in hot, soapy water. Use the fine toothed comb or a Brush Preserver to carefully strip the paint from the bristles.

If the brush is still caked with paint, return it to the crockpot for a few more hours. Apply a small amount of hair conditioner to the bristles, shape them and allow to dry.

Materials Managed: How not to get stuck with PVA glue

Polyvinyl acetate glue, commonly known as white glue, is a staple in all art classes. There are dozens of brands of the stuff out there. But my favorite is Elmer's Glue-All. I've used a variety of different brands over the years but Elmer's always gives me the best results, whether I am using it to actually glue things or I'm making slime (see recipe below). Before I explore the care and feeding of PVA glues, I'm going off on a tangent and take a tour through the land of adhesives. One of the first things I teach my student are the properties of adhesives and when to use them. Like many people they value expedience over aesthetics. They want results RIGHT NOW and to hell with what it looks like. So they much prefer tape, staples, hot melt glue and cyanoacrylates (super glue) over PVA and rubber cement.

When to use what adhesive

Adhesive	Surface	Set time	Cure time	Pros	Cons
Rubber cement	paper	5 minutes	10 minutes	Fast set, no wrinkles, easy to clean up	Fire hazard
Cyanoacrylates	wood (particularly balsa), metal, ceramic, glass	seconds	seconds	Fast set	Brittle, will melt some materials, toxic, glues EVERYTHING including skin
PVA glue	plastics (including glitter, beads and acrylic gems), wood, fabric	1 hour	24 hours	Non-toxic, flexible, dried mostly clear	Will wrinkle paper
Hot melt glue	fabric, glass, ceramic	1 minute	5 minutes	Fast set	Easily broken; very hot
Spray adhesive	paper, fabric	2 minutes	5 minutes	Fast set	Overspray, aerosol
Glue Dots	paper, foam, plastic	None	None	Immediate gratification	Never cures, single point only
E6000	fabric, wood, stone, glass, metal, ceramic	20 minutes	24 to 72 hours	Very durable	Expensive
Wood glue	wood	1 hour	24 hours	Can be sanded and painted	Dries opaque
Glue stick	paper	15 seconds	none	Easy to use	Dries out

There are other options such as epoxy, polyurethane and silicone adhesive but they are messy and toxic so not appropriate for the classroom. OK, so now that we have some basis for identifying when to use what adhesive, let’s move on to the good stuff. Buy 4 ounce bottles of Elmer’s Glue (any variety will do, all you want is the bottle) when they are on sale at WalMart in the fall. Once a grading period, clean and refill the bottles. To clean the bottles you will need a nut cracker, a knife, a towel, some warm water and a jar of petroleum jelly. You can get both at Dollar Tree. The nut cracker makes it much easier to remove the caps that may have become “accidently” glued to the bottle. Scrape the dried glue from the shoulders and neck of the bottle and from inside the cap. If the cap won’t close properly, soak it in warm water until it is free again. Fill the bottle with glue. Smear the neck and inside the cap with petroleum jelly. This will help prevent that accidental gluing problem. If the caps are too badly damaged to use, replace them. Most glue bottles you buy have a 24-410 neck. I buy replacements at Midwest Bottles (www.midwestbottles.com) for 13 cents each. I buy glue by the gallon. Don’t bother with the glue pump. It always clogs and makes a bigger mess.

Controlling Consumption - An Earth Day Art Moment

One of the greatest banes of being an art teacher is waste. Students are constantly inventing new ways to waste supplies. They fail to understand that while the hot glue stick they just dropped on the floor and kicked out the door only cost a penny, there are 200 students doing the same thing every day if the teacher isn't watching carefully. Today's head slapper was a group who wanted more flour in their paste bucket. When I looked in the bucket it only had water in it! I had put fresh flour into every paste bucket just 10 minutes ago! They had put the paste bucket on a shelf behind them and gotten a new bucket because the paste smelled funny. No sooner than I had corrected that issue but I caught one of them digging into my rapidly dwindling supply of flour because, according to him, the paste was too watery. Students will use facial tissues as paint rags or paper towels, use hand sanitizer as hand cleaner, and cut a 2" square from the center of a piece of cardboard, wad up the remainder and throw it in the trash. The minute something goes from new to used, they despise it. It has become unclean.
My secret weapon is pre-packaging materials. Plastic storage bags, portion cups with lids, old plastic medicine bottles, small dispensing bottles from my friendly internet supplier are invaluable. I measure and pre-cut yarn and yarn, count out and package beads. Paint is dispensed in 4 ounce and 2 ounce plastic bottles (Midwest Bottles is a great source). Glitter is packaged in old plastic medicine bottles. Plaster, alginate and gesso are distributed in portion cups (check your local restaurant supply store). Acrylic gems, sequins, foamies, buttons, poms and other small embellishments are portioned into cups and stored in 6 section cupcake pans from Dollar Tree.
The ultimate in recycling are yard sales. I pick up all manner of equipment and materials at yard sales. I recently got four brand-new sets of Prismacolor colored pencils that retail for $20 for only $4 each. Granted the money comes out of my pocket rather than the school budget but my parsimonious soul has a hard time choosing $80 of colored pencils over 250 lbs of clay for the same price. Of course I've also bought clay at yard sales.

Art by the Numbers

Woke up at 3AM with a brillant idea and was trying so hard to work things out in my mind that I couldn't get back to sleep. The addition to my classroom schedule is the 5 Minute Critic. In the last 10 minutes of class, I pass out 3x5 index cards. Each student fills out a card with his/her name, title of his/her work, the date and the name of his/her chosen critic. The student gives the card to the critic and the critic has 3 minutes to examine the work and question the artist. At the end of the time, the critic makes 2 comments on the back of the card: one thing that the artist has done well and one thing the artist can improve and then signs the card and returns it to the artist. The artist has the opportunity to read the comments before turning the card in on their way out of class. Students get the chance to talk about work in progress and get feedback and I get an exit slip.

Papier Mache Zoo Installation

Papier Mache Zoo is installed today. While some of the groups have been very sucessful, others have struggled. THey have great difficulty visualizing their completed work and focusing on work rather than socializing. The Little Red Hen Syndrome was very evident in most groups. If the Red Hen was absent for a day, nothing got done. In other groups there was a lack of leadership and, therefore, a lack of focus.

Welcome

Welcome to All the Glitters. As I approach retirement (only 455 calendar days, but who's counting?), I start to think about finding new homes for some of my collection of equipment and materials, including what is in my brain. So, I begin this blog. If you are lucky enough to find this, you may, from time to time, find offers of arts and crafts materials which you may find more valuable than my ramblings. But sometimes you have to dig through a lot of glitter to find real gold.