TheGM: When my wife bought me a paint-brush cleaning station for Christmas, I thanked her—but wondered silently why I needed it.

After all, I’ve been painting for 30 years using old yogurt cups to hold water to clean my brushes: one cup for regular paints and one for metallics.

Frankly, I don’t need a paint-brush cleaning station. But I like it.

The reason is simple: While I never worried about cleaning brushes with dirty water, I do prefer clean water.

The device is ridiculously simple but clever. It somehow finds a balance among the effects of gravity, the weight of the water, and the impact of air pressure to leak just enough water out of a storage bottle to fill a small “sink” where you can clean your brush.

After you clean your brush, and the water is nasty, you push a plastic button, and the dirt water drains into an interior storage container. Once the water drains, it apparently changes the ratio of air/water pressure in the tank, and the tank releases exactly clean water to refill the sink.

It’s really ingenious. I can go two to three hours before I empty the water storage bottle. Then I just take the device upstairs, pop the top, pour out the dirty water into my kitchen sink, refill the storage bottle, and I’m back in business.

(One note: Don’t reconnect the storage bottle and walk around with it. Unless the cleaning station is level, the storage bottle will overflow the sink and you’ll have a flood.)

As this device was a present, I can’t tell you the manufacturer that produced my paint cleaning station. But if you go to Amazon or another website, you’ll find there are lots of models. Quite a few are under $10.

There are so many models on the market that you may already be aware of this product. But I’d been painting for decades, and I’d never seen it. So, for anyone as oblivious as myself, I would say it’s worth a try. It won’t change your world. But it’s actually quite nice.

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The Corvus Cluster is a Warhammer 40K blog documenting our hobby adventures in the fantastical sci-fi universe of Games Workshop.