Using painter's masking tape on wood

Painter’s Masking tape is commonly used during painting of walls, particularly a feature wall. Considering the adjoining walls have a different colour, the masking tapes help prevent bleeding / dripping of paint onto the other walls on the edges and also to get that perfect much needed straight line effect. This is also used to cover wooden trims, switch panels and plug points.

Prevent bleeding of paint

The masking tape is also a very useful tool while painting wooden furniture or even small wooden crafts. It is especially useful to prevent paint or varnish from dripping onto other surfaces. Both these media are highly viscous and hence any ignored drip can form a blob which will be difficult to eliminate later.

Painter's Masking tape - Avoid dripping / bleeding

Paint perfect straight lines

Masking tape is also effective for painting straight lines when the adjoining wooden surfaces have different colours. Unless you have a sturdy hand and have extensively used paint brushes, it is difficult to get that straight line effect which is where these tapes are highly valuable. Imagine spray painting different surfaces with different colours without the use of these tapes.

Masking tape - Get the perfect straight line

Paint borders for your canvas painting

You may also want to use masking tape on canvas if you have the need to paint straight lines like a border for your painting. Mostly artists have a trained hand that do not need a guiding aid, but a novice might find this tip quite useful. Oil paints take lot of time to dry and hence you may need to be careful about using this on already painted surfaces especially when they are wet.

Masking tape - On canvas

Mark points for installing shelves / frames

Comment from Nayana of Cherish Dream Live on her use of the masking tapes : 

Masking tapes are also useful while installing wall mount shelves or multiple photo frames. The tapes come in handy in marking exact postions where a shelf / frame need to be installed and thereby help in aligning the shelves or the frames in one single line. They also prove useful in ensuring equal distance between the installed shelves/ frames.

Both the pictures below are courtesy Cherish Dream Live and are copyrighted by the respective blog owner.

Masking Tape for Shelf alignment

Masking tape for Photo frame alignment

A practical problem resolved

I had painted the top surface of a set of wooden sticks and let it dry on a newspaper. Next day, I realized that paint had seeped into the bottom surface and had formed a bond with the paper. When I tried to lift the sticks from their newspaper base, some of the paper had got glued onto the stick. I had a troubled time removing the paper remains, besides losing time in repainting the surface.

In my second attempt, I had masking tape stuck onto the bottom side and it made the whole effort a cake walk. The wooden sticks are painted as part of the next project that we are working on. Can you guess what are they part of ? Leave your guesses as comments :)

Masking Tape on wooden sticks

I used the masking tape while staining a center table that I earlier made for our home.

Masking tapes also have other uses in basic woodworking which I shall share shortly. Meanwhile, over to YOU. Do you use masking tapes in your crafts projects ? Do Share your thoughts.

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P.S. Linking in : Colours Dekor, Lines Across my Face

- Somu