How to Use Masks Effectively in Your Paintings

I’m going to talk about how to add the technique of using masks to your oil painting process.

When painting with watercolors using masks is a common technique because the medium can be hard to control. Masking areas helps to keep running paint away, protecting the surface underneath.

Masking can also come in handy when oil painting. In what situation might you want to enlist masking while painting in oils? When you paint shapes with hard edges. When you want to protect an area while freely spattering paint or using a large brush to sweep over areas.

Here’s an example of a painting were I used masks to paint a grid of hard edged squares.

I wanted to take a traditional subject to more of a contemporary place in my painting “Two Worlds”.

This is similar to the mask I used. Since I was lining this up with one edge of the painting before I taped it down, not being able to see through it wasn’t a problem. If placing masks in a more free form way, tracing paper makes a good mask. Not only can you see through it, but it’s so thin that there isn’t a buildup of paint on the edges.

In “The Diary” I wanted to say “grass” without being literal. I decided on dots of a lighter tone green which would give me the look I was after. See the masks below.

Cutting the tracing paper into free form shapes helped making the dots, (made with a standard hole punch), more random. These shapes could then be placed on the painting and moved around until they looked right. There were a lot of holes in each piece, being selective I only painted the holes that flowed along the design lines envisioned.

I premixed the color and value desired so the focus would be on placement, not mixing paint. A fairly stiff mix with no solvent stayed within the holes instead of creeping under them.

The finished painting , “The Diary” with masking techniques.