Brush cleaning isn’t glamorous but if you want to keep your brushes in good condition it’s got to be done. So it’s good to have an efficient system for the chore, then you can spend more time painting. Acrylic painters know that leaving their brushes in water until they come back to paint again can ruin them, so it is best to leave a little time at the end of the day to wash your brushes. Oil painters have to get all the oil out of their brushes, and that can mean that you spend a lot of time washing brushes at the end of the painting day and using a lot of soap. For both oil and acrylic painters our new Jackson’s Marseille Soap can help – it is good value, convenient and cleans brushes well.
Jackson’s Marseille Soap Pellets
Jackson’s Marseille Soap is made with pure vegetable oils so in addition to cleaning it restores natural fats to skin and natural hair bristles.
The soap comes as dry pellets that look a lot like ‘hundreds and thousands’ confectionery sprinkles. This format of soap can be called soap flakes, soap needles or soap pellets. Adding water makes the soap pellets into usable soap. The pellets do not dissolve instantly since they are solid soap, not soap powder. You can alter the consistency by adjusting the amount of water you add and the temperature of the water you use. If you mix one part soap flakes with one part hot water you will get a creamy gel that is great for brush cleaning. If you let it set it will become a harder soap that you can scrub your brushes on. If you make up a cm or two in a jam jar it’s about the right amount to clean a batch of brushes – that’s a tablespoon scoop of soap and the same amount of hot water.
The Best Way to Use It
A good way to use Jackson’s Marseille Soap for brush cleaning is to turn the whole portion of pellets that you receive into one large block of brush soap in the bucket provided. The bucket comes half-filled with pellets – simply pour the pellets out, fill it halfway with boiling water and slowly pour the pellets back in while stirring constantly with a large spoon or wire whisk. Get it all stirred in before the water cools in a couple of minutes, it gets quite thick near the end of the stirring, it will look lumpy, that’s ok. Let it cool for 20 minutes and it’s ready to use. Rub your wet brushes on the hard soap in the bucket and rinse under the tap. Put the lid on when you are not using it. It is very easy to use, quite economical, and it will last for ages.
Variations:

You can sprinkle a few pellets into your hand and rub a wet brush over them and work them in, that way a tiny pinch can be enough to clean a brush or two.

If you prefer a more solid soap you can use two parts soap to one part water.
Shown here is creamy on the left and solid on the right.

It takes either a bit of stirring or a bit of time to dissolve the pellets in cold water, they need to sit about an hour. If you use warm tap water and give it a stir is takes just a few minutes and it is very quick with water from a boiled kettle.

You can also make up just the amount you need, a spoonful in a jam jar using hot water – then it is a creamy and warm brush soap that cleans bristles really well.
Brush Cleaning
Every artist probably has an opinion about brush cleaning and a procedure that works best for them. Here is one method for oils and one for acrylic.
One Oil Brush Cleaning Procedure
If paint is left trapped in the base of the bristles the hairs will get stiff there and only bend in the top half, so your brush is no longer responsive. If any oil is left in the hairs when the oil dries the hairs will be gummed together and the brush will be clumpy instead of silky smooth and your brush marks will be streaky. So you want to remove the oil trapped in the base of the hairs as well as in the body of the hairs. The goal is to get your brush as close to the state it was in when you bought it.
1.
Start with either a container of solvent (a low-odour solvent like Shellsol T or Gamsol is really good) or of safflower oil (because it is slower drying than linseed oil so won’t dry/harden in a covered container for many months) to rinse as much oil colour out of the brush as you can. I like the JAS Deluxe Large Brush Washer as it gives you a perforated platform to rub the brush on and the colour falls through to under the platform leaving the liquid above cleaner – you aren’t just rubbing your brush around in gunk that makes it dirtier.
2.
Next, squeeze out what you can with a cloth or paper. Some brushes are nearly clean of paint at this point. Brushes that have dried a bit or have drying mediums in them might be still quite full of paint. Also thick brushes, large brushes or brushes with very soft hairs will hang onto paint. So it might be worth repeating the two steps as needed, until the brush is as clean as you can get it.
3.
You will probably still need to spend some time washing out the last of the oil colour or safflower oil with soap. Work soap into the base of the bristles and rinse under the tap. Using a Brush Egg instead of your palm will save your skin and gives a good surface to rub the bristles against. Repeat until when you bend the bristles the soap foam is white (with white paint you will have to guess). If your brushes are freshly used (paint not starting to dry in them), or small sizes or used carefully you might be able to use a bit of washing up liquid and get them clean enough. For artists who paint in long sessions, use a lot of brushes in each session, use fast-drying mediums, paint vigorously so the paint is driven up into the ferrule or try to put off cleaning brushes for a few days so they are starting to dry – you probably go through a lot of brush soap, because washing up liquid will only get them halfway clean. You will need a final brush soap to get the fibres/bristles back to their original state. Brush soap costs can add up – so we are very pleased with our new Jackson’s Marseille Soap Pellets, which is a great product at a good price.
Note: If you use water-mixable oils you can skip right to the soap and water, which this soap is great for.

The Jackson’s Brush Cleaning Egg is made of flexible silicone and fits in the hollow of your palm. It allows you to gently flex the hairs of your soapy brush to get the brush clean without rubbing it directly on the skin of your hand.
One Acrylic Brush Cleaning Procedure
If paint is left trapped in the base of the bristles the hairs will get stiff there and only bend in the top half, so your brush is no longer responsive. The fibres may stick together in places if paint dries in the brush, so you get streaks instead of a smooth brushstroke. If an acrylic brush has started to dry it is hard to clean and the base of a soft brush where it meets the ferrule can be difficult to remove acrylic paint from. So you want to remove the acrylic trapped in the base of the hairs as well as in the body of the hairs. The goal of brush cleaning is to get your brush as close to the state it was in when you bought it.
1.
Your brushes have probably been in water so that they wouldn’t dry with paint in them. Give them a brisk dipping and squeeze out as much colour as you can with a cloth or paper. This can remove a lot and save you time and soap as much of the paint will be removed with this process. But another consideration is that this way the paint will dry on your cloth or paper so can be disposed of as a solid and not go into the water system, where some pigments will be undesirable.
2.
Rub the brush under the tap first then work soap into the base of the bristles. Using a Brush Egg instead of your palm will save your skin and gives a good surface to rub the bristles against. Repeat until when you bend the bristles the soap comes out without any colour (with white paint you have to guess). You can go through a lot of brush soap in this process which is where our new Jackson’s Marseille Soap Pellets come in handy.
3.
If you have let acrylic paint dry in the bristles and worry that your brush is ruined you might want to try Zest-it Acrylic Brush Cleaner, a very powerful solvent that will soften even completely dried acrylic paint if you let your hard brush soak in it for a few minutes, after which the paint will peel off of the brush fibres. (A warning: it will soften the paint on the handle, so only soak as much of the brush fibres as you need to, don’t go high enough to submerge the handle.)
*NB-Some artists use the method of brush dipping, to end the need for daily brush washing, so they don’t need to soap their brushes as often. But after using the method for a year I found that although I paint four to five days per week, there were times when I didn’t get my brushes dipped and the oil dried in them making them very hard to restore. The biggest reason the method didn’t work for me was that I didn’t use the same 10 brushes with the same colours over and over again, as I grabbed others I kept adding brushes to the dipping group until it was quite a large group of dirty brushes I had to dip each week and I finally had to admit that it doesn’t work well for the way that I work. But I do plan to write an article about brush dipping as it works really well for some painters.
Jackson’s Marseille Soap Pellets are available on the Jackson’s Art website
Available in an economical 1 kg bucket Jackson’s Marseille Soap Pellets can be purchased on the jacksonsart.com website.
Where are the prices and how dop you order anything
Hi Lesley! the shop is at Jacksonsart.com
Hi Lesley. If you click on each underlined link
in the article it will take you to that product
on the website and you can see the price,
read more about it and purchase if you wish.
I’ve always cleaned my brushes in solvent and then in a gel I’ve made by using old ends of toilet soap and hot water, then scrubbing against my palm until clean. I find the old-fashioned green soap quite good, but I save all the little soaps from hotels which is better. I use rubber gloves when scrubbing with the mixture because the n palms of kitchen gloves are rough and they protect my hands. The method is the same as yours, but I’m interested in your info that modern soap does not have the oil content it used to have, which of course is what kept the brushes supple.
It sounds like a very thrifty method!
Less expensive soaps will have cheaper ingredients and may be more drying. I think all the oil in the mixture has been turned into soap so there isn’t actually any free oil left, but the amount and type of oil makes a difference to the gentleness and drying qualities of the resulting soap.
Our Marseille soap is a very good value, the large bucket will for last months, even if you paint every day. And it cleans well without being drying.
Can this soap be used for cleaning natural watercolor brushes such as sable brushes? I’m guessing it will also restores natural fats to skin and bristles?
Yes, it works beautifully for natural hair brushes as well as synthetic bristles.
It’s gentle enough to be used on your skin, but is stronger for cleaning brushes than washing up liquid.
Hello
Do you have a blog on stopping my synthetic
brushes expanding at the tips. Is it how I
clean them. I use ShelLysol t
Hi Tim
I know, it is frustrating isn’t it.
I have come to think of there being 2 types of changes to synthetic bristles used for oil painting: splaying and what I have been calling fraying. Splaying is when the tip won’t form a point if it is round or an edge if it is flat, it’s like the hairs are pushing away from each other. Fraying is when each fibre bends at the tip or even curls up in a tight little curl towards the outside. Splaying can sometimes be solved by giving the brush a good clean, then dipping just the fibres in hot water and reshaping with your hands – if it works then when it has cooled it will be good again. But the fraying cannot be fixed, I end up cutting those brushes down and they make nice stiff short scrubbers.
But I want to know if there is a way to prevent the fraying. I wanted to see if it mattered which type of solvent was interacting with a type of fibre, so last year I tested 7 synthetic brush fibres in 7 oil painting solvents. I clipped them to the inside of a cup of solvent so they were suspended, not pressing on the bottom and left the set-up enclosed so it didn’t evaporate, for 2 months. None of the fibres were changed. So the only thing I have come up with is that it also takes the friction of movement. After the fibres have been soaked in solvent and maybe that softens them, then the action of dragging the brush across a canvas or scrubbing at a panel must act like scissors being pulled along curling ribbon at Christmas. It must be stretching the fibres. So the next step is to go back and take those same brushes put them back in the solvent for a week and then somehow simulate a few weeks of painting. I will need to make sure the amount of scrubbing is equal for all 49 brushes and that it is enough friction to see a change. Then I should be able to say which fibres are more/less prone to stretching and which solvents make it better/worse.
But that won’t be for a couple of months, I’m afraid. And of course it may not even answer the question when it is done. But keep an eye out for that eventually.
Sorry I couldn’t be more help.
Thank you so very much, so VERY helpful. I shall follow
your advise. Kindest regards, Tim
Is this the same as Murphy’s oil soap?
I’m looking for soap that will restore
brushes with dried paint in them. Thank
you.
Hi Susanna
Pretty much all soap these days is made from oil. Murphy Soap got it’s name back when soaps were made with animal fat, so vegetable oil was a key thing to mention at the time. In all soaps all of the oil is changed to soap, so there is no oil left, even in Murphy Oil Soap, they say on their website that no oil is left in their soap.
Traditionally there were two basic kinds of soap: solid soaps that use Sodium Hydroxide (lye) to turn the oil into soap and liquid soaps that use Potassium Hydroxide (potash) to change the oil into soap. Currently most commercial soaps use many other cheaper ingredients instead.
I checked the ingredient list on Murphy Oil Soap and it is a potash soap, so a similar soap would be a liquid castile soap.
The Jackson’s Marseille Soap is a solid soap made with 70% olive oil and 30% coconut oil. Our big bucket of pellets is an excellent value, as you can add hot water to the pellets and make a full bucket of hard soap to rub your brushes on and it could last for years.
We also stock some good liquid brush cleaners such as Bristle Magic Brush Cleaner and Reconditioner and Lascaux Brush Cleaner.
I hope that’s helpful.
I’ve found a bar of olive oil soap from the
supermarket does the job too
Hi Derek
Thanks for your suggestion!
Although some soap bars called olive oil soap don’t have much olive oil in them unless they are quite expensive, yes, your bar might be similar. But when hot water is added to the bucket of our soap pellets it makes a solid 2.5 litre bucket of very high-quality soap and for only about £10. That’s probably much better value than your supermarket soap.
You should give it a try!
Great article, I clean my watercolour brushes
since 19 years with Aleppo soap (Savon De
Alep) The soap that exist already more than
5000 year. When the crusaders around 1300
went to persia they took back with them the
Aleppo soap. Since then Savon De Marseille
was made. so both good products.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
Just wondering how this product compares
to The Masters Brush Cleaner and preserver?
Hi Marta
Good question!
The Masters is an amazing soap and if money were no object I would use it exclusively. When used as my only brush soap though, the 75ml pot of Masters soap lasts me less than a week. And it is really expensive so I save it for brushes that I can’t get quite clean, because it will finish the job. But if I use it for everyday brush washing I find I get stingy with it and by trying not to use as much of it I don’t really finish cleaning my brushes all the way. I personally think that good brushes are the most important painting tool/ingredient, more important to a good result than the paint or surface. So I want them to stay in good condition so they need to be washed well.
The Marseille soap is like a very good quality bar of French soap but very economical. For less than the price of the 75ml Masters soap you can make about 2000ml of good brush soap that lasts me for many months. So for situations where my brushes are not starting to harden, then this soap is great for everyday cleaning. And I save the Master’s for the final step of a hard to clean brush.
Hello! I find that using Gamsol makes a final
cleaning with Marseille soap difficult ( not
possible) as the two do not like each other.
Am I wrong?
Hi Kitty
I wonder what is happening there. Because that is my process. I swish/rub in Gamsol, then pinch/squeeze in a rag, then wash by wetting with warm water and rubbing on solid Marseille soap, then lathering in my hand. I do it every day and it works well. I sometimes have to lather 2 or 3 times to get the brush clean. Perhaps the first doesn’t lather as much, is that what you mean? Or maybe you need to squeeze it though a pinched rag more.
Hello Julie,
If I make the cream out of your soap pellets,
does it remain a cream, or does it eventually
dry out solid? If so, how long does that
take?
It stays creamy if you use more water. It will start to thicken as the water evaporates.
great to see mine comment is removed!
Hello. No, it just hadn’t been published yet. Sorry for any alarm caused.
I was wondering, is there palm oil in this
product? And if I wanted to buy more pellets
from Jacksons, will a new bucket come with
the order? Because I have stacks of buckets
already. To avoid unwanted waste, do you
know if the other Marseilles soap flakes on
the market are suitable/similar? As they tend
to come in paper bags. Thanks!
Hi Eleanor
I asked and yes, it does contain palm oil.
We get it in very large bags and decant it into the buckets. We don’t use paper bags because we want to keep the pellets dry.
I use the soap almost every day and am only on my second bucket. I find the buckets useful for other things like water and rabbit skin glue, and for keeping small bags of dry pigment.
It is similar to other good Marseille soap flakes, just a large volume for a very good price.