anonymityblaize

This is part two of my tutorial. Part one can be found here. I've made my stencil and am ready to turn it into this t-shirt:

I have ironed my stencil onto the t-shirt, and tucked some newspaper inside so that fabric paint doesn't get the chance to seep through to the back. If one of the two stencils is bigger, or more dramatic, or more of a solid shape, then put that one on first. If you're not using freezer paper as your stencil, make sure to tape it down or make sure it can't move around on your fabric.

I mostly use Setacolor fabric paints. I especially like their "shimmer" range of iridescent colours, particularly for Star Trek crafts as they give me that lens flare-y feel!

I'm mixing the darker grey from a tiny dollop of black lake, a lot of shimmer jet black, and a wee bit of shimmer pearl. You don't want to put too much fabric paint on a t-shirt, less is definitely more. Although you do want to make sure you've got an even covering. Sponges are often better than brushes if you've got a large area to cover. Don't be scared of getting paint all over the stencil - that's what it's there for!

Leave that to dry and then later remove your stencil.

Now here comes the tricky bit. (It won't be quite so tricky if you were sensible enough to print your design directly onto freezer paper twice, and were very neat and tidy with your stencil cutting.) The second stencil sometimes doesn't match exactly to what's already on the t-shirt, so I often find myself cutting it up into smaller pieces to make everything line up. (Having a reference picture of the finished image near to hand can be very helpful at this point.) Sometimes you'll need to overlap pieces of the second stencil, like so:

I mixed a bunch more shimmer pearl into the grey to make the paler colour, and again, left that to dry before I took the stencil off.

I almost forgot to take a pic at this stage, oops!

Then I filled in the blue and red sections, touched up a few bits and pieces that I thought didn't look quite right, and totally cheated on the NCC-1701D - I couldn't face cutting out stencil pieces that finicky (it annoyed me enough on the nu-Trek Enterprise, and those letters were much larger) so I just added it on top freehand. Once that was all dry I ironed it to set the fabric paint.

I hope this tutorial has been helpful, if nothing else, as a guide to the fact that there is no one clear way to do something like this. Trial and error are a big part of crafting (I hope that's true for everyone and not just me!) and the most important stage of any project like this is the planning. The part where you actually put fabric paint on a t-shirt should be the quickest and easiest bit.

And there we have it, my next gen t-shirt!