How to Make Permanent Lines on a Whiteboard

A music teacher in r/Teachers draws a staff across the whiteboard once. Then they draw notes on it, wipe the notes off, draw more, and the five lines never go anywhere. It's the top answer in a thread asking which classroom supplies turned out to be surprisingly useful.

The trick is that a wet-erase marker and a dry-erase marker look nearly the same and come off in different ways. If you redraw a calendar grid, a chore chart or a habit tracker every month, this saves you the redrawing. All it needs is one more marker.

What is a wet-erase marker?

The ordinary whiteboard marker is a dry-erase marker. A wet-erase marker looks like its cousin, but its ink is made with water-soluble dyes, and only a damp cloth will shift it. A dry eraser slides straight over it.

Draw the lines you want to keep in wet-erase and the things that change in dry-erase. Wipe with the dry eraser and the writing goes while the lines stay.

The best-known wet-erase line is Expo's Vis-à-Vis, the pen people used on overhead-projector transparencies. The four-pack of fine-point markers is the standard set.

You can draw grids and all kinds of things you want to be kind of permanent on a dry erase board. Then you can use dry erase for the temporary data and then just wipe the whole thing clear and the wet erase stuff is still there.

u/brianforte, in r/Teachers

Four of the replies under that comment come from teachers finding out it exists. One didn't know it was a thing, another had just discovered them and called them a life changer, and a math teacher uses them too.

How to draw a whiteboard calendar grid that stays

• Test a corner first. Draw a short line in the colour you'll use, somewhere a mark wouldn't bother you, and leave it a day. Then take it off with a damp cloth. A line that comes away clean is the go-ahead, and the reason it matters is further down.
• Draw the grid in wet-erase. Columns for the days, rows for the weeks, a header for the month. Anything you'd want to keep through a wipe goes on in this marker: the staff, the chart's names, the chore list down the side.
• Write the changing things in dry-erase. The dates, the appointments, who's on dishes. Your ordinary markers, the same as before, as long as they still wipe clean.
• Wipe with the dry eraser. The writing comes away and the grid stays. That's the month done, and the next one starts on the same lines.
• Change the grid with a damp cloth. The same cloth is how you get wet-erase marker off a whiteboard when you've drawn a line in the wrong place.

Do wet-erase markers work on a whiteboard?

Expo's support page says it's common on restaurant specials boards: the heading and the days of the week go on in Vis-à-Vis, and the specials go on in dry-erase. A school-supply shop that stocks them says they work on any laminated or whiteboard surface.

Quartet, a whiteboard maker, once sold a grid kit built on exactly this. The box held a wet-erase marker for drawing semi-permanent grid lines. Your own dry-erase did the data, and a damp cloth cleared the grid on the day it needed to change. It's discontinued now, but a maker shipped the method with its name on it.

The catch is in Expo's wording. Its answer on using the two together is a yes, if the board is a quality one that withstands water. The marker was designed for film and laminate, so a whiteboard is the "if" case. That's what the corner test above is for.

Will wet-erase markers stain the whiteboard?

One teacher in that thread says yes, and the colour was red:

Just fyi, I used a red wet erase on my white board once and it DYED my board and literally nothing would take it off.

u/Tport17, in r/Teachers

Nobody else in the thread reports the same, so no colour can be called safe and none can be called unsafe. Whichever colour the grid will be in, that's the colour to leave in the corner overnight first.

Fine or ultra fine?

Vis-à-Vis comes in a fine point and an ultra fine, and the fine is already thin by whiteboard standards. A social studies teacher with pull-down maps says the fine tip is too fine to be seen by anyone in the room. Another spent years hunting for a chisel-tip version and never got hold of one.

For a calendar on the kitchen wall or in a home office, read from a metre away, that thin line is what a grid wants. For a board the back of a classroom has to read, it's too thin, and tape is the better answer. Between the two tips we'd take the fine point, since fine is already on the thin side and there's no thicker one to go to.

Wet-erase marker alternatives: tape and Sharpie

The same teachers reach for tape when they want lines that will never smudge. Artist tape was the top suggestion in the thread, in widths down to about an eighth of an inch, and it leaves no residue. Another music teacher makes their staves from pinstriping tape, the thin stuff from the auto-parts store. In a second thread, a teacher who moves classrooms uses electrical tape or sign vinyl because both peel off cleanly when the board changes hands.

Tape never stains and never needs a damp cloth. What it can't do is a curve, a header in your own handwriting or a quick redraw when the layout changes. That's the case for the marker.

Sharpie stays on a whiteboard too, up to a point. One teacher draws lines in permanent marker, writes over them in dry-erase, and the eraser doesn't touch the Sharpie. Isopropyl alcohol on a paper towel takes it off later. Another has done the same and found the weak spot. Go over a Sharpie line with a dry-erase marker and it erases, so a stray stroke takes a bit of the grid with it. They've only left it up a week or two at a time, and for anything longer they'd go wet-erase.

Start with the corner. Draw a short line from the four-pack low in one corner tonight, and in the morning see whether a damp cloth takes it clean off. A board that passes is a board you draw the grid on once. From then on the eraser takes the dates every month and leaves your Saturday alone.