How NOT to Paint Stripes

You know that I have a thing for string art – it’s so just awesome!! But in all my string art project, I hadn’t done a state one – so of course I had to give it a try. And so today I want to share my Striped State String Art project with you. But more than that, I want to show you How NOT to Paint Stripes – so you can learn from my mistakes 😉

The thing is, I even knew the right technique, but I was being lazy and thought maybe cutting corners would work – it didn’t, ha!!

How NOT to Paint Stripes

You’ll need:

-board

-paint

-tape

First up, paint the background color. If you’re doing light and dark strips, it’s easiest to make your background color the light color. That way when you go to paint the stripe of the darker color, it’ll cover the lighter color. I of course didn’t follow that advice.

Next up, tape off your board – I used really cheap masking tape, which was the second mistake. Use painters tape – it will seal SO much better!!

At this point you need to seal the tape. I didn’t. Mistake number 3!! So I should have painted a “seep” layer to seal in the tape. Basically, once you have your tape on, paint another layer of that same base color over the tape. That way if it bleeds and seeps under the tape, it’ll be the same color as the background and it won’t matter. And then you paint your stripe color over it, and the stripe color won’t bleed because it’s been sealed off by the seep layer. Again, I didn’t do that – I jumped right to the stripe color:

One dry, peel off the tape. If you’re like me, you’ll see that it bled under like crazy!!! I just went with it, but it was definitely not what I had in mind when I started my project!