Mastering the Optical Illusion for Straight Cut-ins

2:20

28:23

80.1K views

At 2:20 in

An Ultimate Guide To Cut Ins: Paint Straight Lines Like a Pro!

Watch on YouTube

What happens here

To achieve a visually straight ceiling cut-in, especially on textured or wavy surfaces, paint approximately 1/16th of an inch *onto* the ceiling, overlapping the wall color onto the ceiling texture. When standing back from the wall, your eye will perceive this line as straighter because the slight overlap is less noticeable than a wavy line painted strictly on the wall side. Avoid painting 1/8th of an inch *below* the ceiling onto the wall, as this will make any imperfections in the ceiling line much more apparent due to an optical illusion. If a previous painter has already painted a noticeable border onto the ceiling, you must paint over it to cover the old color, even if it's slightly wider, to ensure a uniform appearance. Using a high-quality paint, like Behr Dynasty, that covers well will help achieve this without showing the underlying color.

Goal: Create an optically straight and clean ceiling cut-in line.

Tools and materials

Paint Behr Dynasty — Applying to the wall and slightly onto the ceiling

What they say

(2,501 characters)

Hide

on this scenario we have you know kind of a wavy ceiling that's not perfect we've got Orange Peel textured walls we got a hand textured ceiling and we've got some texture insert C places you know in that ceiling now I'm going to talk about an optical illusion when it comes to doing ceiling cut ends if you do your ceiling cuttings if you bring them down say like an eighth of an inch and not get anything on the wall when you stand back from the wall you're actually looking directly at that line and if that line isn't perfectly straight you're going to see that wave in it this is the illusion that I'm going to be talking about so if you Side by bringing it down you better have your line perfectly straight or you're going to um think your lines are really really crooked they'll actually look more crooked than they really are now if you Side by taking the paint up onto the ceiling a little bit like a 16th of an inch getting it up onto the ceiling the only way you can really see that is by getting up against the wall and looking up if you stand back away from this um the wall which typically people are doing when they're in the room they're walking around the room they're looking at the wall and they can't actually see a wavy line cuz it's actually up on the ceiling so I always teach the new guys that do the cuts for me to actually Side by getting it up on the ceiling a little you'll have a lot more success you people looking at the cut ends will on the optical illusion will be able be a lot straighter so um my recommendation would be just to get it up onto the ceiling a little bit the scenario I've run into right here is um the person that did the cins here did actually do that they got it up onto the ceiling a little bit and I've got to actually cover all that because if I don't if I paint this white that we're painting and this is pretty white pretty similar to this and this brown is left on that ceiling little pieces that brown they're going to see it and it's not going to look very good so you definitely have to Side by getting it up onto the ceiling and actually covering all that other stuff that was left behind of this color right here but it's actually not going to be that bad because this color is similar to this color siding by getting it way up on into the ceiling even maybe like an eighth of an inch it's going to actually look really good and you're going to have you know success here so we got a pretty ideal scenario to deal with so now I'm going to…

Auto-generated from the video audio.