The Poured Painting: Dealing with Rough Edges

Something I forgot to mention in my previous post was the problem I encountered trying to pull the blue painter's tape off the sides of the MDF. Instead of pulling off cleanly, it remained firmly stuck to the MDF wherever pouring medium had seeped through it. I was able to remove some of the tape but about half of it refused to budge. I then tried to sand it off by hand. Still no go.

Rough edges and stubborn tape remnants pose an aesthetic problem

Oops...!

Thinking that just maybe the whole messy business would look better painted over, I applied a coat of Cobalt Teal, an opaque color I had also used in the pour. Well, that turned out to be the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig, to quote Sarah Palin. The color was nice but the tape remnants still showed through and still looked awful.

So what to do next? I could have taken a sander to it but frankly that idea didn't work for me at all. All that dust....yuck. Besides, it would require a trip down to the basement to find the sander, hunt up more sandpaper, and figure out a way to clamp the painting down while I performed the surgery. Not my idea of fun.

Much better, don't you agree?

After mulling the problem over some more, I came up with this: just cover up all four sides with strips of painted butcher paper. (I've done this using artist's tissue in the past, but tissue does tend to show any imperfections in the MDF.) The butcher paper would camouflage both the rough MDF and the tape, resulting in a nice smooth finish. With careful measuring and cutting I could butt the paper strips together at the corners -- no mitering needed. So that's what I did and it turned out fine. I used two coats of Cobalt Teal on the butcher paper, measured and cut out four 3/4 inch wide strips, and adhered them to the sides of the MDF with Yes!Paste. Easy peasy. I liked the result so much I'll use this treatment on all MDF panels in the future.

And you can be assured that next time I do a pour, I'll seal the edges where the tape "wall" meets the surface of the MDF panel with acrylic gel medium before I do any pouring. The gel medium should keep the pouring medium from penetrating into the tape. I'm not sure I'll use painter's tape again, either. I'm thinking duct tape might be a better choice. And next time I'll use gel medium to glue the paper strips to the sides of the MDF. (Yes!Paste was just a little too messy.) This project was intended to be a learning experience...and it taught me quite a lot!

Text and images ©2014 Lynn Edwards