Postby Esoteric » Sat Apr 29, 2006 6:57 am
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.
