DIY Spray Painting A Custom Shirt

Do you have some cans of spray paint, a spare t-shirt and some common materials to make a stencil?  Then you have all the stuff it takes to make a custom t-shirt.  I was curious about how well a shirt would last if I just used spray paint on it.  See how I made an ammo box looking t-shirt.

The video shows you the process in about 3 minutes (outtakes at the end).

Choosing the Stencil

These are stencils I made for the ammo box drawer fronts. They’re plastic dividers for binders that were going to be thrown away. Pretty much you can make a stencil from anything like varying thickness paper or even tape.

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Materials

The shirt used is just an inexpensive 100% cotton fruit of the loom shirt. Because this project is about using paint I already had, the paint is Rustoleum white and yellow.

To make sure the shirt stays flat I’m using some foam core but you can use any scrap plywood or hardboard.

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Sticking the Stencils to the Shirt

So the stencils don’t move use spray adhesive to keep them on the shirts. If you let it dry for a minute the adhesive will just be tacky and not leave adhesive on the shirt.  I know this because I was impatient with the “Linked” stencil and it left residue on the shirt.  The residue ended up coming out with the first wash.

 

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Masking

After you position the stencil on the shirt, use tape and newspaper to mask off anything you don’t want to paint.

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Painting

Because I thought the yellow paint might not show up that well on the black shirt, I sprayed 2 coats of Rustoleum white paint first and then 2 coats of Rustoleum yellow paint.

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More Painting

I still haven’t kicked my ammo box habit so I made the shirt look like an ammo box with the rest of the stencils.

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The paint ended up saturating through some of the cloth.

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Heat Treating

I saw online somewhere that heat treating would help set the paint. To stay out of trouble, I have an iron that is specifically for project.  With the iron set to the cotton setting I tried to use a towel between the iron and t-shirt.  Not enough heat was getting through so I switched to a paper towel.  This seemed to heat the shirt sufficiently.

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First Wash

I ended up waiting a day before the first washing.  This wasn’t intentional but more of a by product of having to clean the garage and being too tired to mess with the shirt till the next day.

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Durable

After the wash and dry cycle it was still pretty durable.  I was able to pull on the painted area of the shirt without it cracking.

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Only thing is the shirt is really inexpensive and the cotton fabric has fibers that stick up slightly.  The these straight up fibers were painted causing a raised pilling effect.

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Scraping

I didn’t want those things falling off me like yellow dandruff so I got rid of it by scraping it with a putty knife.

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Final Spray Painted Shirt Design

The shirt has gone through its 5th washing now and hasn’t faded.

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