Awesome Camp Half-Blood Shirt With Back Design.

After 8 thrilling, hilarious and awesome years of the Percy Jackson and the Heroes of Olympus series, it has finally came to an end on the 7th of October 2014, the final book of the Heroes of Olympus series, The Blood of Olympus.

So, to pay tribute to this great story by Rick Riordan, I've decided to make my own Camp Half-Blood shirt design of what I've imagined the campers in the story would've wore.

As you can see in the pictures, the front design is the standard Camp Half-Blood letters and the Pegasus. The back part is my own design that includes the symbol and name of the camper's godly parent as well as it's Cabin number as stated in the book.

This instructable is for people who absolutely suck at Art and fails the subject in school every single year like me. Thus I've came up with a solution for people like us, which is to paint with templates!!!

For this instructable, I'll be showing you how to make Percy's Camp Half-Blood shirt, a.k.a. the Poseidon's cabin shirt. If you want designs of other Greek Gods mentioned in the Percy Jackson series, comment down below and I'll share the templates with you.

This is also my 1st instructable, so please comment on how I can make things better for you guys and ways to improve this design. Cheers!

Step 1: Materials and Tools

Materials

Plane orange coloured shirt. (Or any colour you wish)
*Tip: Use lighter coloured shirts to give a better contrast between the black letters/designs*
Black colour fabric paint.
3 Transparent A4 sized plastic sheets, or a transparent A4 files if you have some at home.
*You can get the A4 plastic sheets from bookstores for a few bucks*

Tools

Crafting knife
Small brush tip painting brush
A printer
Cellophane Tape
Blue Tac (Get the less viscous texture ones, I'll show you why later)

Step 2: Template

Printing
Front Side: Can be found at step 7
Back side: Download the Microsoft Word file(at step 7) and print out both the papers on A4 sized papers as well.

Making the template
Front Side: Just place the transparent A4 plastic sheet over the printed paper and then secure them together with some cellophane tapes or blue tac. (Don't secure them too much, cos you'll need the plastic sheet later). Then, use a crafting knife to "cut out" the white inner areas following the INNER black outlines.

Back Side: First, join the 2 pieces of paper together by stacking the paper with the Trident above the 2nd POSEIDON paper, but with the POSEIDON paper overlaying the Trident paper. Now make sure that the Trident is 4.5cm above letters POSEIDON. Then join and secure the papers together with Cellophane tape.
You should end up with the 3rd picture.
Follow up by taking a transparent A4 plastic sheet and cut it accordingly to the top part(Trident) of the joint papers, AND add 0.5cm to the bottom part of your plastic sheet. Then take a second A4 plastic sheet and stick it with previous plastic sheet at the 0.5cm mark. After you're finish, you should end up with the same shape as the joint papers in the 3rd picture.
*Here's the extra part, for letters than have spaces sealed off like letter "O", "D", "B", "P" and "A", draw lines to "connect" the inner spaces to the whole paper/sheet. like the 4th picture.

Place the joint plastic sheets over the joint papers, align them then stick them together with cellophane tape/blue tac. Using the crafting knife again, cut out the black areas EXCEPT THE ONES INSIDE THE LINES THAT YOU'VE DRAWN.*

When you're done with everything, you should end up with templates like the last 2 pictures.

Step 3: Painting Time

Before you start to paint anything, take blue tacs and stick them on the 4 edges of the back of the templates, next to the edges of the letters and the Trident. As seen in the 1st 2 pictures. This is to prevent accidental movement of the template and to make sure the letters are paint with as much precision as possible.

Front Side: Place the template on the upper middle area of the front side of the shirt such that the distance between the shirt collar and the TOP OF THE LETTERS CAMP HALF-BLOOD(not the top of the template), is 7.5cm apart. To ensure that it's in the middle, measure both the distance between the 1st and last letters, "C", "D", and the sleeves of the shirt. As shown in the 3rd picture. And make sure that both the distances are the same. Take a step back to make sure everything's nice and even. Once you're satisfied, you can start painting.

*Read through part 2(next step) before painting*

Back Side: Similiar to the Front Side, place the template on the upper middle area of the back part of the shirt. But this time, the distance between the tip of the Trident and the shirt's collar is 4,5cm. Make sure the distance between the letters "P", "N" and the sleeves of the sleeves of the shirts are the same, so that the template's in the middle. Take a step back again to check whether the template's slanting. Once you're done, start painting!

Step 4: Painting Part 2 - Filling Up the Gaps

I would like to apologies beforehand, because I got too carried away with it that I've forgotten to take pictures of the shirt right after painting it with template. So please bare with me as I talk you through the process.

Front Side

After you've done painting the shirt with the template, leave the shirt for about roughly 10-15 minutes before removing the template to prevent the wet paint from smearing. Once you've removed the template, you'll notice that they're gaps within some of the letters and especially the wings of the Pegasus. These gaps have to self painted. So leave the shirt over night to dry and make sure you're not agitated or angry when you paint the gaps because you'll be painting them freestyle. Trust me, the end result won't be good if you're agitated and you'll only get more agitated in the end.
Follow the picture of this Pegasus and paint accordingly.

Leave the shirt to dry(NOT under direct sunlight) for 1 full day before turning it over to paint the other side.

Back Side

The steps are the same as the front side. And this time you can refer to the Microsoft Word file in Step 2 to paint.

Once you're done with painting, leave it to dry(again, not under direct sunlight) for around 1-2 days before moving on to the next step. So in the meantime, just admire your artwork. :D

Step 5: Ironing

Before you put on your shirt, you're gonna need to iron it to heat set the fabric paint.

Do this by placing a cloth over the painted areas, then set your iron to medium heat and iron the painted areas back and forth for 15-20 seconds.

Step 6: VIOLA (and Precautions)*

SO GO MY FELLOW DEMIGODS, GO EXPLORE, GO CREATE YOUR OWN FATE!!!

Oh, and 1 more thing, here's what you should avoid doing to your shirt.

DO NOT wash with softener, it'll affect the paint. How? I don't know and I don't plan to find out how.
DO NOT scrub the painted areas too hard.
DO NOT keep quiet while wearing this shirt. Seriously, you're wearing a badass Camp Half-Blood shirt... GO AND BRAG TILL YOU'RE HEART'S CONTENT.

Where was I again... VENTURE ON, FELLOW DEMIGODS.

Step 7: Extra Templates

So, instructables doesn't seem to like me a lot, thus I'll be posting all of the existing templates of other Gods/Goddess that I have at the moment because somehow I can't seem share the file in the comments.

*UPDATE*

Apologies once again, for not figuring out that I could've shared the files via Google Drive... All the files are in Microsoft Word Format.

Templates(including Poseidon & Pegasus) can be downloaded from ----->

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B8Q3J74ub1lQalJyTDc1WWtVbkU?resourcekey=0-4G9W9yGzddrzm08-rvANtA&usp=sharing

(30/8/2022: The link has been updated, I'm incredibly sorry that google has expired the previous link)

They are:

Athena

Apollo

Aphrodite

Ares

Artemis

Hades

Hephaestus

If you'd like to have designs for other Gods/Goddess, feel free to comment down below and I'll try my best to design it for you :). But just keep in mind that my own personal designs are not the true symbol of the God/Goddess, you're always free to pick your own design, this is Instructable after all ;) .