CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

Well, today I realised that I have a great desire to design my own T-shirt. I know that there are fabric paints, but I am unsure as to how well they actually work. I just have a few questions and I hope that someone can answer them.

1. Does the color of the shirt matter? While I do know that all paints will be effected by the color of the shirt, I'm wondering how far that goes. For example, Would white paint show up well on a black shirt?

2. Does anyone have any general tips? Such as what kind of paint to buy, how long to let the paint dry ect.?

Thanks in advance to anyone that can help me out.

Well... there's more than one method for painting a shirt. On the simple. inexpensive end, there's hand brushing with craft paints. On the complex, expensive side, there's silk screening. I only have experience with handpainting since I'm a cheapskate. I've made five shirts (three which I like).

I use a bottle of Delta Ceramicoat textile to make my 'fabric paints'. It's basically a rubbery glue you mix in with ordinary craft paint to make it fabric friendly. I'm sure there are other brands of the stuff too. As for the craft paint, the cheap Delta and applebarrel brands have worked fine, but since it's better to use only a few colors with this method, I prefer Liqitex acrylic now. It's tougher, rubberier paint.

As for color and t-shirts... coverage depends greatly on the paint. Black and white both cover well becuase they normally use what is called an 'opaque base'. Paint has two parts, the glue and the pigment. With many colors like deep blues and reds, the glue part of the paint is clear ('clear base'), because if it was white, you would get light blue and light red. It also means those colors don't cover others very well. That's why on many professional screenrprinted shirt, you see white under the other colors. It's because they use inks which wouldn't normally show up on a colored shirt well.

The best advice is to experiment. See if the colors you are thinking about will show without first painting white or some other 'opaque base' color under them.
As for getting sharp straight lines when you paint on fabric, you'll need masking tape or frisket to prevent fuzzy, edges.

I am familiar with the silk screen process, It is usually best for printing large quantities, otherwise it is expensive. You need a seperate screen for each color in the picture, it will cost you about 30 bucks per screen, so it's best that you have a simple design or try heat transfer. I am told by heat transfer (I think that's what It's called) you can basicly print full color photos on a T shirt in an inexpensive manner, maybe 15-20 bucks?

Thanks for the responces!

You guys provided some very helpful information. I should be doing this next weekend, I'll let you know how it turns out! Thanks again