Home-made t-shirts are awesome gifts to give to your friends. They're personal, cheap, and when I give them out people always love it. This recipe will teach you how to easily turn a photo into a hip hi-contrast image that you can stencil onto a shirt.
Stenciling a t-shirt isn't hard - in fact, you probably already have some of the materials lying around your house somewhere.
Ingredients:
1. Prepare your picture
Import your picture into Photoshop, and adjust it to the proper size. I'm using a grainy mugshot of Charlie Sheen for my stencil. Convert your image into greyscale by opening the Image tab, then going to adjustments: desaturate.
Next, lets separate Mr. Sheen's head from the background. You could trace around it with the pen tool, or just use the magic wand and eraser tools to remove the background.
My original picture was a little dark, so I fiddled around with the brightness and contrast (Images:adjustments:brightness/contrast) until the shadows on Charlie's face stood out a bit more.
2. Make a Silhouette Stencil
All I had to do was go back to the Image tab: adjustments: posterize and slide the bar all the way to the left. If that doesn't work for your picture, mess around with the brightness and contrast some more, or go to Image: adjustments: threshold and slide the bar around until you find something that works.
Now we're going to get rid of the "islands". These are any white spots that aren't connected to the rest of the negative space on the stencil. Get rid of them with the paintbrush tool, add a little french mustache, and you've got a sweet stencil design. Print it out!
3. Cut out your stencil
If we cut out the stencil from printer paper, paint could bleed through the paper and ruin your shirt.
So lets cut it out of something a little bit thicker. Tape your design FIRMLY to a thin piece of cardboard. Then, just cut out the black parts with your knife, making sure to cut through both the printer paper and the cardboard.
If you got rid of all your islands, you should now have a kickin' rad stencil that won't fall apart when you pick it up.
4. Painting your shirt
Go get your t-shirt and iron it until there are no wrinkles on the area you'll be painting.
Next, mix your paint with just a smidgen of fabric medium. This will help the paint bond to the fabric so it doesn't flake off in the dryer.
Put your shirt on a flat, hard surface. Put a piece of cardboard in between the top and bottom layers of fabric to prevent any paint from bleeding through.
Finally, just put down your stencil and roll some paint over it, making sure that the stencil stays in the same exact spot while you're painting. Let it dry for about 30 minutes and voila!
Stenciling a t-shirt isn't hard - in fact, you probably already have some of the materials lying around your house somewhere.
Ingredients:
- A shirt
- Acrylic paint
- Acrylic fabric medium (can be found at most craft stores next to the acrylics)
- Rolling brush
- X-acto knife, box cutter, or other dangerously sharp object
- Tape
- A thin piece of cardboard (I use a manilla file folder)
- Photoshop, or another image editing program (there's a free one called GIMP which you can download here)
1. Prepare your picture
Import your picture into Photoshop, and adjust it to the proper size. I'm using a grainy mugshot of Charlie Sheen for my stencil. Convert your image into greyscale by opening the Image tab, then going to adjustments: desaturate.
My original picture was a little dark, so I fiddled around with the brightness and contrast (Images:adjustments:brightness/contrast) until the shadows on Charlie's face stood out a bit more.
2. Make a Silhouette Stencil
All I had to do was go back to the Image tab: adjustments: posterize and slide the bar all the way to the left. If that doesn't work for your picture, mess around with the brightness and contrast some more, or go to Image: adjustments: threshold and slide the bar around until you find something that works.
3. Cut out your stencil
If we cut out the stencil from printer paper, paint could bleed through the paper and ruin your shirt.
So lets cut it out of something a little bit thicker. Tape your design FIRMLY to a thin piece of cardboard. Then, just cut out the black parts with your knife, making sure to cut through both the printer paper and the cardboard.
If you got rid of all your islands, you should now have a kickin' rad stencil that won't fall apart when you pick it up.
4. Painting your shirt
Go get your t-shirt and iron it until there are no wrinkles on the area you'll be painting.
Next, mix your paint with just a smidgen of fabric medium. This will help the paint bond to the fabric so it doesn't flake off in the dryer.
Put your shirt on a flat, hard surface. Put a piece of cardboard in between the top and bottom layers of fabric to prevent any paint from bleeding through.
Finally, just put down your stencil and roll some paint over it, making sure that the stencil stays in the same exact spot while you're painting. Let it dry for about 30 minutes and voila!
