to customize your clothes or decorate your home (curtains, lampshades, etc.), fabric painting offers infinite possibilities!
Fabric painting is done with a special acrylic paint that can be fixed by heat (iron or 150° oven). You can make your own fabric paint by mixing acrylic paint with a specific additive.
paint is applied with a brush or stencil brush. The fabric must first be washed to remove any primer that might cause the paint to "slide". Avoid even slightly fluffy fabrics when painting with a brush, as this makes the task more difficult.

To paint a T-shirt, and it's a real pleasure to make your own clothes...

Click to enlarge it must be ironed and laid flat. Slide a thin piece of cardboard inside (to prevent the paint from staining the back of the tee-shirt) .

Recommendation: it's almost impossible to remove a paint stain on fabric, so work carefully, not hesitating to cover unpainted surfaces during application. There are now multi-substrate relief paints that don't have this disadvantage and can be removed with water (as long as they haven't been fixed), but they don't allow painting with a brush as in these examples.

Towork with a stencil, as above, if it is not self-adhesive, fix it with temporary spray glue (does not stain). Work with a stencil brush, dabbing excess paint onto a cloth. Several colors can be applied to create relief and light effects.

[espace-pub-horilarge] Without astencil, to paint a motif, the ideal solution is to use a printer, which allows you to choose the size of the design.

If the T-shirt is white or light-colored, simply slide the printed sheet into the T-shirt to see the black line through.

For a dark-colored tee-shirt, the easiest way, if the motif lends itself to it, is to cut out the design(s), secure them with small rolled scotch tape and go around them with dressmaker's chalk (or grey pencil).

Painting text and letters
there are stencils with the whole alphabet and stylized letters. For a wider choice (but reserved for light-colored fabric), there's nothing like printing the text using a word processor, which lets you choose the font and size.

This is how we made the T-shirt, centering the text and painting it through with a brush. The butterflies are stencilled.

To fix the colors before the first wash, simply use an iron: follow the fabric paint manufacturer's recommendations, as the range is wide.
For objects that cannot be ironed (such as lampshades), the paint can be fixed by heating in an oven (a few minutes at 150°C) or with a hair dryer.


[Stencils] [Painting on wood: stencil technique]