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Now I have cleaned off my block of wood a bit and my hands are totally dirty. And so
one of the best kept secrets in printmaking is that baby wipes are an excellent way to
clean the ink off of your hands. Basically because it's a petroleum based product, also
using baby oil or, what I wouldn't recommend for your hands, alcohol, these are going to
be the cleanup elements that you are gong to keep in your studio for woodcut printmaking.
Primarily baby oil, or some type of oil, and alcohol for cleaning both your blocks of wood,
and for cleaning your brayers and your pallet. Now if I wanted to clean my pallet, this is
oil based ink, so it's going to stay wet for quite a while, depending upon the temperature
and the amount of humidity in the air, which always affect how long it takes for inks to
dry. This ink could stay on this pallet for a good number of hours, if I wanted to continue
working my block of wood and then use this ink again to print with, I can also put a
piece of tissue paper over top of it to help prolong it's life. But if I am ready to clean
off my pallet, the first thing that I'm going to use is a blade, in order to scrape off
the ink. This is the quickest way to get that ink off of the pallet. From here, I can keep
this ink, which I would suggest, you could store it in with a piece of tissue paper,
or other type of parchment paper, so that you can use it again. I'm going to just put
it at the edge of my pallet so I can use it later today in the printmaking process. The
rest of this area I can clean with my baby wipes, believe it or not, or a touch of oil,
a touch of alcohol, or something like Simple Green can also clean this surface pretty easily.