Custom Painted T-Shirts

I used an inverted screen printing technique to paint a Hollow Knight shirt for my brother (the one on the right), and then fully hand painted an Arcane design on a shirt for myself (left), because after completing my custom tote project, I realized I could use fabric paint to put pretty much anything I wanted on a shirt.

The design I was copying was too complicated to use a normal stencil, but I found a technique online that would still allow me to laser cut some form of stencil, but without all of the pieces falling out. The technique was essentially the inverse of screen printing, where instead of putting a stencil over mesh, you just cut mesh holes only where the open parts of the stencil would be. This took a lot of trial and error with the laser cutter settings, but eventually I ended up with a piece of plastic that would allow paint to pass through in the specific areas of the design. I then used this plastic to transfer paint onto the shirt (the picture in the top right). I wasn't able to get a super clean transfer (bottom left), but it was enough to make it pretty easy to clean up the details with a paintbrush (bottom right).

I saw a video of someone using fabric markers to draw Vi's back tattoo design (from Arcane) on a hoodie, and knew I had to try it. The Hollow Knight project showed me that it was actually pretty easy to just fabric paint on a shirt, so instead of trying to fight a stencil again I decided to just freehand it. I didn't do a lot of planning out the proportions, I just went section by section and roughly outlined with a fabric pencil and then painted over it— in hindsight this was probably not the safest bet, but I'm glad it worked. I'm not super happy with how uneven the pigment is in some of the filled in areas (the paint was not very opaque), but I'm still proud of how the design turned out.