ecunderbase:

I’d fucking love to.

For now I’ll just show you my processes of getting pictures onto fabrics… if anyone is into like, a shirt-altering/making tutorial, hmu I guess? Maybe I would do one of those if people were interested?

Anyway, let’s do this shit.

I’ll start with Tailgate since that’s the one I just posted:

This one I never actually drew a picture for. I literally hooked my laptop up to my TV monitor and displayed everyone’s favorite Tailgate moment,

then taped a shirt to my TV and used it as a huge lightbox. (I just use regular washable markers to draw patterns onto fabric, it comes off onto your hands when you’re working a lot, but they wash out all the way every time and are super easy to come by).

After that, I used a shitty plastic paintbrush (to prove you can use just about any brush) to paint the black parts with fabric paint (Tulip SOFT MATTE is my preferred flavor for t-shirts). Then, THIS IS AN IMPORTANT STEP IF YOU PLAN TO FABRIC PAINT A LIGHT COLOR, I washed out the marker. If you don’t do this, when you paint with the light color, the marker shows through, and now you’ve effectively protected the marker with a layer of paint, and you can’t wash it back out.

I created the screen-tone effect by dipping the back end of the brush in paint and stippling (you can see I didn’t quite clean the brush afterwards lmao). I did this shirt back when I’d just finished moving, so now that I’m chill and stable, if I did it again, I’d buy a grate with a small hole-pattern and just paint through it to make the screen-tone effect. You can also see that my paint didn’t go on so evenly, you can hide this simply by adding more layers, but this also makes the paint layer more hard, maybe uncomfortable for a t-shirt. ✌️

Next, let’s talk about the CHOOM CHOOM. It’s literally just using a light fabric transfer paper.
So is the Swerve shirt from a while ago.

All you need to do is print on the transfer paper using an inkjet printer, and then iron it on.  I use NEENAH JETPRO SOFSTRETCH Heat Transfer Paper, because it’s really good quality (read “doesn’t peel after machine washing, and doesn’t feel all stiff on the fabric”).

The thing about light fabric transfers is that the transfer is actually translucent, like using the ‘multiply’ layer in art software. So, if your shirt isn’t white, you’ll get everything diluted by the color of the shirt. To combat this, I actually colored Misfire and Crankcase a little more saturated and purple than normal (to oppose the yellow of the shirt). Here’s the true color of what I printed out:

If you want to transfer something to dark fabric, I use 3G JET-OPAQUE Heat Transfer Paper (also because of the great quality). I haven’t done any Transformers with it (yet), so here’s Jaco:

With opaque transfer paper, you have to cut out everything that you don’t want to be on the t-shirt. Everything you don’t cut out will be white (as opposed to the light transfer papers, which are just transparent). That’s why it’s good to have… big round circles in the background.

Another shirt I did a long LONG time ago was using screen printing techniques. It’s where you use a light-sensitive paste to make a mask on a screen of fabric. It’s like using a stencil, but instead of having your ink go through the empty parts of a stencil, they bleed through the unmasked parts of the fabric screen.

I did this in high school art class, so I don’t know what brands to recommend, but you can buy the ink, paste, and fabric screens at craft stores and online pretty easy. Screen printing is also much more involved than transfers just from preparing the masked screen, so def Google around a bit for tutorials before trying.

If you do want to do a straight up stencil, you can buy gridded sheets of vinyl and spray-on fabric paint at craft stores too. The spray-on fabric paint is usually kind of drippy… but gets the job done.

NOW FOR SOME WICKED NONSENSE, where I just fucking abuse the powers of sewing for dark robot magics.

If you want to embroider fast and dirty, you can do it on a sewing machine. They make a special foot (the one I’m holding above) for just about every machine that only the holds the fabric when the needle is in it; so, when the needle is up, you can move the fabric wherever you like. Tense up the fabric in a hoop, and you’re pretty much drawing with a very stabby pen. I also used some transparent water-soluble stabilizer (a fabric/plastic sheet that you can draw on and melts away in water, it’s used to both hold your pattern and literally stabilize stretchy fabrics while you’re sewing them) to trace my picture off my computer screen and then pinned it to the fabric, so I I knew where to sew. I ended up not pinning it very well, and Ironfist kinda shrunk width-wise because my pattern kept shifting… RIP. (You can see a bunch of process photos of the stabilizer etc here).

If you’re not about filling in big swaths of thread, you can also get into appliqué. It’s like embroidery, but all the big chunks of color are different bits of fabric. In normal
appliqué, you use a tight (but still spaced out) zig-zag stitch to secure the raw edges of colored fabric, but since I’m a madman, I used a very VERY tight zig-zag stitch to make solid black outlines. You can also mix and match embroidery and
appliqué

like I did with Rung. (The holiday lights’ wire is made using a hand embroidery technique called “split stitch”. There’s lots of hand embroidery technique tutorials out there on the ‘net). One thing you should definitely do when
appliquéing is use some form of interfacing. It’s basically a glue that holds your small bits of fabric onto the main one while you’re sewing them. Commonly, the glue is heat activated (with an iron) like I used, and thus isn’t sticky when you’re sewing (which is such a fucking relief, as I’m about to talk about…) It’s also important to put some stabilizer on the backside of your piece whenever you
appliqué

or embroider, especially if your fabric is stretchy (the fleece I was using here was not stretchy, so I actually didn’t use any… this time).

And because
appliqué-ing Rung wasn’t awful enough for me, I’m currently doing Riptide.

Since my stabilizer kept moving when I did Ironfist, I decided to get some stick-on stabilizer (I really wanted something iron-on, so that it wouldn’t be sticky while I was sewing, but apparently ‘water-soluble’ and ‘iron-on’ don’t mix, so they don’t make that. I could get permanent or tear-away stabilizer, but I prefer there to be no stabilizer when I’m done, because it’s a stretchy shirt).

As it turns out, using stick-on stabilizer is apparently Pandora’s fucking box. The adhesive sticks to the needle and the thread all the time, which causes my thread to tear… every… fucking… 10 stitches. SO, the only way I can get this to work JUST BARELY is by rubbing my needle in SEWER’S AID every few minutes, basically a lubricant that you can put on thread, needles, and fabrics to make everything slide past each other real good. I also widened my zig-zag stitch, so it wouldn’t take for-fucking-ever (tragic, I really liked the solid black lines I got with Rung).

One thing this particular stick-on stabilizer has going for it, is it comes in 8.5×11″ sheets with paper backing, so you can literally print on it with a home printer (much relief from having to trace my patterns from my computer screen), and, I guess it hasn’t moved yet like with Ironfist, so I guess it’s doing it’s job???

That’s all for now…. I’ll show you Riptide when he’s done. 👍

I also have some straight-up hand-embroideries and a bathing suit I’ve been scheming… so more on that eventually too.

Saving for later.

Looks like I’m gonna get an inkjet printer and some transfer paper.