Paintings By Kirsten Elizabeth Gilmore Studio Blog

How to paint "wet-on-dry" masked shapes

A DIY Acrylic painting tutorial

Photos and paintings are by Kirsten Elizabeth Gilmore. All rights reserved.

In the last tutorial, I showed you how to drybrush over blue painter's tape to create a visually textured shape with a clean, straight edge. This tutorial uses the same method, but with thick, wet paint.

Here is a close-up view of a recent painting (work-in-progress).
Notice the crisp lines, even in areas with highly-textured surfaces.

Bonus material:  Fixing crooked edges

This tutorial will also show you how to "over-paint" to correct a dried, uneven paint line or edge. Everyone makes mistakes, from time to time, while painting. This simple technique can help you tremendously.

Materials:

• Blue painter's tape for delicate surfaces
• Acrylic paint ("thick body" or thickened with a gel medium.) Note that Galeria brand's "soft body" acrylics are actually a consistency between "thick body" and "soft body", so they will work for this demo without anything added to them.
• Palette an artist's plastic palette works or a plastic lid, cleaned and recycled from a food container or baker's parchment (used as a disposable palette) Parchment should be taped to the table.
• Flat brush (preferably nylon)
• water tub
• paper towel
• airtight plastic container (for stay-wet, paint storage)
• surface to paint on This could be a fully-dried painting or a painting with a dried base coat or, you could do this on a pre-primed, white hardboard or canvas.
• palette knife for mixing paint

Procedure:

1. Make sure your surface is fully dry before you begin.
2. Decide where you want your line or shape. 
3. Mask around that area with blue painter's tape. If you want a line, mask on either side of the line to determine its width. Press hard at the edges to ensure the tape is secured well with no wrinkles.          

   

   Notice how The top line I am masking is to make a correction to a wobbly line.

4. Load your brush half-way up the bristles with a thick glob of paint. Then, paint inside the shape.                               
5. To make a patterned line, brush different colors over the masked shape (as in the photo below.)                                                    
6. Before you lift the tape, plan where you are going to put it. It will have wet paint all over it. While working, I sometimes have a plastic disposable grocery bag nearby for wet trash. The trouble is that the tape sticks to the bag opening and can create a mess. So, I keep a clean, plastic lid from a food container to "stick" the tape to. You could do the same with a paper towel laid on the table.
7. When you remove the tape, you should get a clean edge to your shape.

How I use this technique in my own paintings:

Here are more views of my 24"X36" painting-in-progress that uses this technique:

Closeup-view of the heavy texture and clean edge.