Taped Differently: Free-Form Grid Art with Acrylic Inks
What happens when you let the grid freewheel, use acrylic inks, gold stencil, and a tape that didn't quite cooperate
A grid doesn't have to be made of squares.
That sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but it's surprisingly easy to forget when you're sitting in front of a blank page with a ruler in your hand. Grids have rules built into them, or at least, we think they do.
This piece started with a question: What if I just let the tape go where it wanted?
The answer turned out to be diagonal. Angular. A little chaotic. And actually, it's kind of interesting.
I also tested a new tape in the process. Spoiler: it did not survive the wet materials. But the piece did. And that's usually how it goes.
Materials:
These are the materials I used, but please use the ones you're comfortable with or want to experiment with:
Watercolor paper
Water-soluble pencil
Masking tape (I'm still on the search for good tape, so leave your tip)
Acrylic inks (I used warm colors)
Spray bottle
Brush
Gold acrylic paint + stencil + sponge brush or makeup sponge
Needle bottle filled with white acrylic paint
Neon pink acrylic or ink for spatters
Hair dryer
Paper towel (for when the ink moves faster than you do)
Instructions:
Let the pencil wander first.
Before the tape goes down, take a water-soluble pencil and make some marks across the page. Loose, wandering lines, nothing deliberate. When you wet the page later, these lines soften and become part of the texture rather than a drawing.Tape your sections freely.
Lay your tape across the page without worrying about right angles. Diagonal lines, irregular shapes, sections that don't match. That's the whole idea. Press the tape down firmly, especially if you're planning to work wet.Add some pencil lines if you don't like working with a blank page
Wet the page.
Before adding any ink, wet each taped section with clean water. This is what lets the acrylic inks move and merge rather than sitting in hard blobs on the surface.Drop in your acrylic inks.
Drop in your inks and let them fall onto the wet surface. You don't have to fill every section perfectly. Some space is fine; it gives the piece room to breathe. But if you want more coverage, use a brush to gently spread the ink around. Watch how the colors shift and mix where they meet.Use a spray bottle for extra movement.
A few sprays of water will spread the ink further and create organic blooms and textures you can't plan. Try it and see what happens.
Lift with paper towel if needed.
If the ink feels like too much, dab with a paper towel. You'll lose some intensity, but you gain more control over where it goes. Use this sparingly. The intensity is part of what makes it work.Dry it.
You don't need it bone dry before moving to the next step. Just dry enough that the ink won't keep spreading into your stencil or writing. A hair dryer works well here.Add gold with a stencil.
Place a stencil over parts of the surface and dab gold acrylic through it with a sponge brush or makeup sponge. Don't try to be precise. Let the gold land in random spots across different sections. It doesn't have to be even.Write across it with a needle bottle.
Fill a needle bottle with white acrylic paint and write asemic marks across the surface with letter-like shapes that don't mean anything specific. Move through the sections, cross over the tape lines, let the hand decide. Just make sure each section gets something. Of course, you can also use a gel pen or an acrylic marker for this.Add neon pink spatters.
Load a brush with neon pink and flick or tap it across the surface. A little goes a long way. Or use the dropper from the ink. This is the moment to be slightly reckless.Pull the tape.
Here's the moment of truth. If your tape is good (and on good watercolor paper), you'll get crisp white lines. If your tape is like mine, well, you'll get soft, slightly blurry lines that bleed into the color. Both can work. The blurry version has its own character.Look at what you made.
Not what you planned. What you actually made.
Final Thoughts:
Is it what I expected? No.
Did I have fun making it? Yes.
Would I do it again? Already thinking about what I'd change.
That's the whole point of this series. The grid is a starting point, not a destination. You push against the structure, and the structure pushes back, and somewhere in that conversation, a piece appears that you couldn't have planned from the beginning.
The tape that blurred the lines, I thought, was a failure at first. It makes the sections feel like they belong together instead of just sitting next to each other.
If you're working with tape and wet materials, I'd love to know what's working for you. Especially if you're in the Netherlands and you've found something that isn't the purple tape from Action (which I love, but it's just too wide for smaller work).
What's Next?
Explore further
Want to see what grid art looks like with sharper lines, smaller sections, or watercolor instead of inks? Browse the Grid Art playlist Every video is a different experiment with the same starting point. If you're new to Grid Art, this framework might help you.
Try a variation
Same process, completely different palette. What would this piece feel like in cool blues and greens? Or just black ink on white, no color at all?
Reflect & continue
Where did you want to control it, and what happened when you let the tape decide? Sometimes the materials know something you don't.
