I made this shirt with a few simple things: acrylic paint, my computer, and textile medium. Ah, textile medium. Let me rave about this stuff for a bit. You add it to regular acrylic paint, and it turns it into fabric paint! Whaaaat?!? It keeps the paint from getting all crusty and grubby and thins it without bleeding. AWESOME.
Anyway, good stuff. I started with designing an image for my shirt on one of those t-shirt designer sites, thinking I would buy it. Then when I saw I would be paying 30 clams just for a Kermit on a tee, I just took a screenshot of the design. Am I lazy? Yes. Cheap? Yes. Too impatient to wait for it to come in the mail? Of course. Thus commenced my trip to The Wallyworld to pick up a $3 shirt and a bottle of paint.
I used the freezer-paper stencil technique for the circle frame. If you aren't familiar with that, just do a little "research" on google. There are tons of posts and sites about it.
After painting the frame I free-handed Kermit in the center. If you aren't artsy enough to hand paint it, you could easily just use the stencil technique for this part too. I was originally gonna do that before I decided to just wing it. Hence the pop art style pic I used.
Let me just say this was not the finished product. I added a few more coats and details after this pic was taken.
After I painted in Kermit, I used the freezer paper stencil again for the lettering. I cut them out with and Xacto knife and ironed the sheet on. A tutorial for working with this kind of stencil may come in the future since this post is already getting a little long-winded.
I waited overnight for it to dry and heat set it with the iron the next morning. After that it was ready for struttin' out!
Hope this inspires you to make your own custom tee featuring something you love too! It's a really simple fabric painting technique that can be adapted to anything: tote bags, yards of fabric, pillows, etc. As always be awesome, and have a nice day!
Sounds like fun... Maybe I'll do something like this on a tote bag.
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