Our guide and tips for storing and preserving your paints

Your artwork is a timeless expression of your creativity and therefore deserves high-quality colors, whether they come from pencils, crayons, ink, felt-tip pens or paint. Badly stored paints run the risk of damaging the quality of your painting or discoloring it.

Looking after your leftover paints is therefore essential to preserve their brightness and value over time. As an expert in color and top range creative tools, the Maison Caran d’Ache can share its most valuable tips to preserve the quality and longevity of your paints. Here is our guide to taking care of your tubes, jars and bottles of leftover paint.

 

It's not rare when painting to need only part of a tube of paint. As they usually come in 250 milliliter or 500 milliliter formats, tubes of paint can still be more than half full after their first use.

Whether you're using acrylic paint or gouache, you can easily store a tube or bottle of paint that's already opened if these are well protected. It's not rare to discover on reopening a tube of paint that a layer of film has formed. This is generally because air has got inside and is interacting with the paint by creating a film or even cracks on the surface. This film can lead to a change of the paint's texture and make it unusable. As its composition becomes more solid it can give a cracked look to the paint when you add it to your canvas. To avoid drying out, carefully store your opened pot of paint.

How long you can keep gouache or acrylic paint will depend on several factors including its storage conditions.

●  Good-quality gouache and acrylic paints that are stored in ideal conditions (stable temperature, in a dry place out of direct light) can be kept for several years if they haven't been opened.

●  Once opened, their shelf life can vary. If the bottle or jar is carefully and properly closed after each use and kept in good conditions, gouache and acrylic paints can last two to five years.

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Are you a professional painter or an amateur? Here are some tips and techniques to preserving the gouache and acrylic paints you use every day.

To maintain the paints’ quality as much as possible, it is recommended you keep your gouache and acrylic paints in the containers they came in. Tubes and bottles have been specially designed to preserve the quality of your paints over time.

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Water-based paints, gouache and acrylic adapt to all techniques and arts and crafts on different media. Easy to dilute in water and with high coverage capacity, these paints that have a creamy texture and concentrated pigments can nevertheless lose all their properties. Even if they are hermetically sealed, tubes or jars of paint can alter over time if they are subjected to very hot or very cold temperatures.

To keep and preserve dilutable paints, store them in a room that has a temperature between 10°C and 25°C (between 50°F and 77°F). This will avoid any risk of your paints freezing, which would alter their texture and properties. If paints freeze then defrost, their structure can disintegrate, their texture become grainy or they can lose their covering potential.

While gouache and acrylic paints are highly resistant to light, the intensity and brightness of the colors can still be lost and fade if they are kept in very sunny conditions.

Submitting paint to high UV levels can lead to loss of original color over time. To avoid this, keep your jars, tubes and bottles in a dark place.

Once opened, a tube or jar of paint will gradually lose its sealing powers. Interaction with air leads to the evaporation of the solvent in the paint, which can then rapidly disintegrate. To preserve your leftover paint, make sure it is properly sealed by always closing the tube or pot. Unlike watercolor which is kept dry in its tin, jars or tubes of paint must be tightly closed with a lid to make sure they are sealed.

To avoid the paint crusting over on the surface, make sure you properly close the jar or tube of paint.