The Great Fabric Medium Experiment, Part V

As you may recall, I spent some time this fall gathering different brands of fabric medium, different brands and qualities of acrylic paints, and testing them all at different dilution levels to find which would be the optimal combination for painting T-shirts.

The delay in posting the concluding part (parts?) to this experiment was a delay in heat-treating, curing, and washing the test T-shirts.

While the paint swatches were more flexible when warm, I'm not sure how much heat treating did for the preservation of the paint work.

More important is, how well did the samples survive the wash, and how wearable the paint/medium combinations are.

The yellow Liquitex acrylic ink pretty much disappeared into the red t-shirt, but it was fairly transparent to begin with. The more fabric medium in the mix, the less it seems to disappear into the fabric. It's fine on a lighter color fabric, such as the bleached areas on my Boo Christmas t-shirt, and no fabric medium was needed for that application.

The Golden High Flow paint//ink was soft enough without fabric medium, and looks like the Delta Ceramcoat and Americana fabric mediums have minimized what looks like a very minor amount of bleeding of the unadulterated paint.

Without fabric medium, the Golden Fluid and Liquitex Soft Body paints come out as similar textures to the various brands of craft paint, but with brighter color due to their higher concentrations of pigment — which is pretty much the same as before anything was heat-treated or washed. That said, neither is completely opaque.

In general, the thicker the paint, the stiffer the sample patch, even with fabric medium and washing. The thicker paints and applications (e.g., two coats) were also more likely to crack.

Of the craft paints, Folk Art gave the softest finish; it and Martha Stewart are the best for opacity.

The odd swatches of specifically-formulated "fabric paint" were a bit softer than their craft-paint equivalents, but not necessarily more opaque.

My patches of Elmer's "washable" School Glue did not wash out of the shirt, but I'm not sure if that's because I let it set in too long.

The Great Fabric Medium Experiment, Part IV

I finally got some time to finish up my patch tests. Instead of buying another new T-shirt just to paint up, I pulled an old, bleach-stained blue T-shirt from the rag pile. This means that as colors become less opaque, the perceived color will shift towards the blue, rather than towards the red. I shouldn't see an issue with more opaque colors, and the increasing thickness of the paints in my test suggested that my colors would be more opaque.

The last three paints

As you can see, that was not quite the case. While there was little color shift with the dark Martha Stewart Multi-Surface Satin Acrylic Craft Paint in Chipotle, both the Folk Art Acrylic paint in Wicker White and the Liquitex Acrylic Paint in Light Portrait Pink showed significant opacity issues with fabric-medium dilution. Also, the Folk Art paint — which I had expected to be a better quality craft acrylic paint and more opaque than the Martha Stewart paint — showed the same opacity issues as the other acrylic paints. (This might be an issue of the particular pigment: Folk Art also offers a Titanium White, which is considered to be a more-opaque white pigment.)

Also noteworthy: the Folk Art paint was also subject to the same sort of bleeding exhibited by the most fluid paints.

Opacity Issues, Random Controls

The blue shirt also has a couple of control swatches: on the top left, I have Americana Shading Flesh by itself, and Golden High Flow Acrylic Cerulean Blue Hue both by itself and diluted 1:1 with GAC-900. The difference between these color swatches and those on the red shirt suggest that even apparently opaque paints are subject to color shift on colored fabrics. There's also an open square of GAC-900 by itself, It has discolored the fabric, but I'm looking to see how it will work as either a surface prep (like gesso) or a resist. Similarly, there's a closed square of Delta Ceramcoat Textile Medium on the right side, along with a rectangle of Fabric Creations Soft Fabric Ink in Yellow (which is not nearly as opaque as it had appeared to be when creating my "Star Struck Person With  Headscarf" portmanteauji T-shirt).

Preliminary Observations

Before heat treating, my impression is that for any non-fabric-specific acrylic paint thicker than Golden High Flow Acrylic, the paint swatches are very stiff until we get to a 1:1 paint-to-medium ratio. Unfortunately, this is the point at which pigment dilution issues start to become obvious. Also, since all of the fabric mediums were thinner than all but the Liquitex  Professional Acrylic Ink and the Golden High Flow Acrylic, the lower the paint-to-medium ratio, the higher the likelihood of bleeding.

Because of pigment dilution, a more concentrated pigment is needed for better results on non-white surfaces. This suggests that our usual method of painting T-shirts with craft paints is probably the least effective method for getting a good result.

The samples were done with a single coat of paint, with a second layer applied to the upper half of the Apple Barrel and Americana control samples; a second coat may be necessary (but may further stiffen the textile).

Next step, heat treatment.

To Fabric-Medium or Not to Fabric Medium?

Our local Michaels decided that rather than have folk create detailed costumes to a theme such as Alice in Wonderland (2013) or The (Steampunk) Wizard of Oz, we would focus our 2017 Halloween effort on something simple: Emoji T-shirts. This follows on the popularity of emojis: last month, we had a very popular "Emoji Cupcake" class, and Emoji versions 5.0 through 5.2 have been making their way into mobile devices and computer operating systems throughout the summer and fall.

Most of our T-shirt decorating events — we had two this month — tend to have a strong painting component to it. Mostly, we use regular craft acrylic paints such as the CraftSmart paints we sell for about $0.70 per two-ounce bottle, with nothing added. Since most of our T-shirts are wear-once items, the cardboard feel of painted cloth and the durability of the design is not an issue — but for those with a longer expected lifespan, there are techniques for making the painted fabric more flexible and, well, washable. These involve using more expensive paints designed for use on fabric, adding "fabric medium" to regular acrylic paints, and/or heat-setting the painted designs.

[A side note for those of us who are not avid painters: "mediums" are materials added into acrylic paints to change their texture, appearance, and properties. "Gloss" mediums make paints glossy; "matte" mediums remove their shine; "slow-dry" mediums extend a paint's drying time; "crackle" mediums give the finished item a cracked and aged appearance.]

For the most part, I've not had success with fabric medium. Then again, it wasn't until reading the instructions on the fabric mediums we sell that I learned I needed to heat set the painted fabric to activate its effects. While I remain skeptical about the flexibility of craft-project paint (as opposed to professional silkscreen-printing fabric paint), I was (largely) diligent about adding it to the three T-shirts I created for our Halloween dress-up. (FWIW, I did two different fake emojis — a portmanteau of "Star Struck" and "Person With Headscarf", and a World Diabetes Day version of "Face With Open Mouth and Cold Sweat" — and a T-shirt version of our mobile app just for fun.) The portmanteauji made it through the wash with little damage, but my Michaels app cracked and lost much of its top paint layer, despite the using fabric medium according to package directions, and some of the dimensional fabric paint stuck to itself and had to be peeled off. (That said, the areas that felt most like cardboard before washing came out less stiff and minimally damaged. They were also the areas that were heat treated almost to the point of burning.)

Portmanteauji Detail -
after washing
(heat-treated)

App Shirt Detail:
White-on-Red cracking, paint loss
after washing

Dimensional Paint damage
after washing

Gray-over-White and Red-on-White
paint loss (non-heat-set)
Dark Red over Red consistency
(heat-set) after washing

While I'm debating whether or not to touch up the failed parts of that T-shirt, I'm very much wondering about how one's choices of paints, fabric medium, and proportions of one to the other affect a T-shirt project that one might actually want to have a life beyond the washing machine. I'm in the process of gathering materials to do a "sampler" T-shirt that should (hopefully) give me some answers.