Grabbed this vintage color wheel, a 1962 Milton Bradley one, for $4 from a house in Sellwood. The lady who owned it clearly used it, there's paint smears and pencil marks all over the back, but the front color chips are perfect. I'm torn on whether to wipe it down and make it pristine or keep the grime since that's what shows it was actually used by an artist, not just decoration. Does everyone here think old tools lose their story when you clean them up, or is a clean vintage piece more valuable?
He used a 1987 bottle of India ink on a commission last week after I told him it would dry chalky, but the lines came out cleaner than my new $14 bottle. Was he just lucky, or is there something to letting pigment sit for 35 years, anyone else tried this?
I used to baby my sable brushes for months, cleaning them after every stroke with expensive soap. Last year I picked up a $15 set of beat-up palette knives at an estate sale in Gary, Indiana, and now I do all my texture work with those. The blades have this weird flex and rust spots that leave marks no new tool can copy. It changed how I layer paint on canvas, way faster and messier but the results look alive. I still use a brush for linework, but everything else is knives now. Anyone else ditch their fancy gear for junk that just works better?