How to Paint Straight Lines. Where to Use Tape

have you ever wondered how some folks paint straight lines so easily but on your jobs it looks as though you painted them whilst riding a top of Border Collie like this little monkeyy who my brother is quite fond of for some reason I think it's one of the few things that brings him Joy moving on today I'm going to show you why you might be on The Struggle Bus trying to paint straight lines how we get straight lines on our jobs and some tips and tricks to get the results that you want so that brings us to the age-old question should you freehand it or tape and when I say freehand I mean cutting it in with a brush with no tape no safety net just getting after it generally folks will fall into two camps with this question and either they freehand everything and they don't use any tape or they tape way too much when my brother Josh and I first started out in the field we didn't tape anything and it was kind of a point of Pride for us but really we were just being silly and slightly inexperienced uh then one day a client goes wow our old painter taped everything and you guys did everything by hand that's super impressive and then we were like oh really uh what what uh what did he tape exactly so through the years and through trial and error and working in with other paint Crews that used a variety of methods we kind of landed on a blending of techniques of both freehand lines and taping uh that allow us to get straight lines in an efficient manner so that brings us to what should you tape uh before I get into that this process will only work if you paint in the same sequence that we do we paint the trim and the ceiling first and then we paint the walls last if you look at a typical wall with a window or a door on it uh you've got a couple lines that should be straight the line between the baseboard and the wall the lines around the door frame or the window frames and then the line between the ceiling and the wall all right so if you're looking at this wall I'm going to go over what we tape and then I will show you our taping process after I cover that uh so on a typical wall like this we will tape out the baseboard that does a couple things it gives you a super straight line between the wall and the baseboard and it also protects the baseboard from any splatter that's going to come off the roller when you go to actually roll the walls and then uh you've kind of got dealer choice on window casings and door casings uh on the sides you can tape into those uh we used to do that now pretty much we freehand all those lines um but if you have some like tighter corners and things like that and you're just uncomfortable with it you can very easily tape into it and that's not a big issue now that you know that you're going to be doing some taping you might be asking what tape should you use I would highly recommend inch and a half yellow frog tape it is the tits you can get super clean lines with very little bleed through I can't recommend this enough it's awesome onward to some taping Basics uh the first thing you want to do say You're taping out some baseboard you want to pick a direction you're going to go uh I'm right-handed I like going from left to right my brother's a lefty he goes the other way whatever your preference doesn't matter just kind of stick to one pattern as you uh kind of progress around the room this is what I like doing I like getting about a 3 to 4ft section it's a little bit wider you know it's not quite an arm span but it is uh fairly easy to control and then what I tend to do is uh put my thumb thumb down on the left side on the top of the baseboard and then kind of work the line in along the top of the baseboard and then once I get it lined up the way that I want then I'll seal it across uh with my thumb and then you just keep layering these sections along uh as you go and you don't need to use caul or anything like that to seal in good tape particularly stuff like the yellow frog tape you'll get plenty clean lines if you put enough pressure on it with your uh whatever finger you choose after you are done cutting in and rolling everything thing and your last finish coat has gone on when you go to pull tape you want to pull tape in the same direction that you laid it down uh cuz if you do that uh each section that you laid on top of each other will uh pull up in one long section and then uh you can crunch it all into a super sweet tape bowl and throw it at somebody cuz that's fun also when you go to pull tape particularly on baseboards you want to pull kind of on an angle not straight up uh as you see in this video that we did as we pulled tape you want to kind of pull out a little bit and a little bit down and that way you're not going to rip up into your finish paint and potentially rip the uh paint off the walls uh which is no bueno now that you know what you should tape uh we're on to what should you freehand of all the techniques required in typical house painting I think this one gives people the most anxiety which is cutting a clean line between the wall and the ceiling but you're in luck don't even worry about it in fact you don't need to develop any skills at all just use this handy ACU brush it'll give you straight lines that even the professionals will be jealous of I'm joking this is hot garbage despite what you'll hear from people in the comments so first thing no tape why you might be asking uh so if you tape the ceiling and then paint into it a lot of times you get bleed through some of the worst lines I've ever seen have been from homeowners or even previous painters Taping that ceiling line and then they go to pull tape sometimes it'll rip the ceing paint off of the walls and really what you want when you're cutting in the ceiling line particularly is the appearance of a straight line not necessarily a straight line which I will get to in a moment couple things that will make this process quite a bit easier for you number one and probably the most important is to use a quality brush I can't emphasize that enough if you're trying to cut and freehand a decent line and you're using a garbage brush that's going to be very difficult uh I prefer a 2 and 1/2 in Corona Cortez uh these are awesome if it's a little bit too too uh wide for you you can always get a 2in variety um just because if you're not used to doing this type of work you are holding this above your shoulder line uh to cut this line and uh it does get fatiguing after a while particularly if you're not used to it now when you go to cut in your ceiling line you want to be in the correct orientation and what I mean by that is uh some of the mistakes I've seen people make is that you don't want to be looking straight into the line you're cutting into like if my head was touching the ceiling as I'm cutting in cuz that's that's not how anyone's going to be looking at that line you want to be underneath of it looking up so you want to be generally you're going to be up on a ladder but the you want to your eyes need to be below that line so that you can tell whether or not it's looking uh straight uh once you have your direction established say we're going to go from left to right uh I'm going to dip my brush into my paint pot I like wiping off the side of the brush that's going to be closest to the ceiling uh then I wipe a lot of the paint off of the brush just below where I'm starting the ceiling line so that I don't have too much uh in the brush then I start cutting that line from left to right I think some people's tendencies that I've seen is that they slow down and then if you slow down you go super slow you're going to notice way more Shake in the brush so not that you should be going as fast as you can but you want to pick a decent speed and that'll actually help things even out when you're cutting in this line it's actually more important that the line is continuous then it's perfectly straight one more little tip if you wanted to look more straight from standing on the ground it's a little bit better to get more paint up on the ceiling a little bit than lower if you go too low it looks weird from the ground uh versus if you get it if you run it up a little bit on the ceiling not crazy uh it'll look better uh just in general when people are walking around the room if you end up getting too much on the ceiling you can always come back and touch that up with some ceiling paint it's not that big of a deal also keep in mind it's likely you'll be doing two coats so if you have any janky lines on your first pass you can clean those up on your second go around and that's often quite a bit easier to straighten things out so for straight lines the more you do it the better you'll get at it and I can't emphasize this enough being able to cut in a clean line between the walls and the ceiling is a keystone skill and it will pay dividends if you can work towards getting relatively decent at that I know as a young professional painter myself way back in the day uh one of my uh most proud moments was when I was able to start cutting in clean lines between the ceiling and the walls it just opens up a lot of other techniques that you can do makes your life way way easier that being said even if you can paint straight lines and tape straight lines and all that good stuff if you mess up your cocking in the first place it'll really hinder how it looks and it might even nuke your sweet straight lines that you worked on if you want to learn how weog you can check out this video right over here was this a video or was it all just a dream

Channel: Super Vassar Brothers

Views: 3,110

Keywords: how to cut in, how to cut in straight lines, paint straight lines, tape baseboards, cut in ceiling line, painting straight lines, how to cut in walls, cutting in tips, cutting in, cut-in hacks, how to cut in paint, painting tips, painting tips for beginners, cutting in ceiling, paint ceiling line, painting a straight line, taping trim, how to tape trim

Id: JSsebgysMg4

Length: 8min 27sec (507 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024