Freehand Acrylic Painting for T-shirts

Step 5 Color wash

Sometimes you want your image to have, say, a blue background, even though it's on a white shirt.  You don't want to gob tons of blue paint on the shirt.  Even with textile medium, it's going to make the shirt feel a bit coarse (and rubbery).

This technique can make it look like you've used watercolor on your shirt.  Be careful, though... paint bleeds a lot more on a t-shirt than it does on watercolor paper.  It's really difficult to control the direction and amount of bleeding.

Dilute your chosen color (still important to have it mixed with textile medium) with lots of water.  Make sure your other paint on the shirt is dry.  Begin as you would with the translucent brush strokes, but before they dry, dip the brush in your water, and touch it firmly to your shirt.  The water will spread and so will any wet acrylic paint.  Keep dipping and touching your brush to wet any areas you want to have the effect.

This will take some experimenting, but it's fun.

If your shirt is soaked already and you brush a color across it, it will bleed some but still retain a darker color where the brush stroke was.