How to Clean an Airbrush

Cleaning your airbrush is just as important as knowing how to use it and make beautiful masterpieces. I'm Rachael Teufel, and in this class, I just wanna share with you a couple of quick tricks on how to clean your airbrush properly so that you don't end up with any messes on your cakes. So I actually have some residual paint inside of this container, and you just wanna pop off the lid, you wanna dump out any excess that you might have, now, if this is pure color, you can actually put it back into the bottles, or you can save it, your choice, but just try to get as much out of it as you can. And then into a paper towel, just go ahead and use your airbrush to get any excess color out. You can see, you know, there was quite a bit left in here, even though I had already dumped out most of it, but that just kind of helps keep the cleaning process once you go into the water a little easier.

I always have a bowl of water next to me to be able to change colors quickly and easily. And one tip is just to put your finger on, this is the needle nose, just put it on the needle nose, and be able to utilize the water to blow air back up through your needle to release any color that might be stuck in the shaft of your gun. Then, you wanna just make sure that you go back to a paper towel and see if you have any residual color. If you do, go ahead and just run it underneath water again, make sure it's clear, and then you can try again. And note, at this point, I definitely have just water coming through, I don't have any additional color.

You can always do it onto a white paper towel as well, that's helpful. But you just wanna make sure you don't have any excess color hanging out in here. If you have color in here and you let it dry, you're probably gonna need to soak it just a little bit to release that paint from the surface of your airbrush, but don't worry about it. I mean, it just takes a little bit longer. They do also have some little brushes that you can get in there and really scrub if you've let it dry in there.

One other thing that you should do every once in a while is just unscrew the needle nose at the top and just make sure that that needle doesn't have any buildup on it. After spraying for quite some time, you get what's called a dry brush at the end, where if you look really closely at your needle, sometimes you can see paint that has dried at the end. So definitely remove this every once in a while and just get any excess paint out of there. And the last portion of that is unscrewing the back end of your brush. So this is really just a cap, more than anything.

This first screw that you have is what's locking in your needle. Just loosen it, don't completely take it off, but just loosen it, and you can actually slide your needle out, and you can clean it. So you can see, let me pull up the towel here. You can probably see the end of my needle still actually has some blue paint even though I already ran water through it. So one way to do it is just to wipe it.

And always wipe towards the needle. You don't wanna point this needle at anything and potentially bend. So always pull back. You can get a little bit of water on it and again, just pull back. And so you just wanna make sure when you're looking at the needle, that it doesn't have any residual paint left on it.

And then ever so, you, well, you can actually run paint this way too, again, just to clear out any of the paint that might be left in the shaft there. And then ever so carefully, you wanna put your needle back in and just make sure it comes all the way out to the front. These needles are pretty tiny, so just make sure that it's at the very end, and then tighten it back down, and put your cap back on, and you should be good to go at this point. You shouldn't have any blue color left in there. If your final, if you're done with all of your airbrush for the day, and you're just gonna set this away and store it, you actually wanna empty this out, get some clear water, or just take this directly to the sink and run some clear water through it.

You don't wanna leave any residual color in there. Now, if you are really struggling and you have a lot of airbrush color that is just dried up in there, a little bit of glass cleaner will actually do the trick. So you just wanna spray a little bit inside. Don't spray your air out of this because it's gonna aerosol the cleaner and that could be really bad for you. You wanna put your nozzle back on.

Make sure it's tight. And then just using your finger, run air. And now that air is gonna create some bigger bubbles. It's just running it through here so that we have the bulk of the color cleaned out of it. Again, just don't spray that cleaner out.

That would be bad. And then, of course, always rinse and run clear water through it again, just to be sure that your airbrush is fully clear. So those are just some really quick, easy ways to be able to clean out your airbrush and make sure that it's working properly so that you don't have any mishaps on your cakes.