Paint Options
Spray paint is the staple for stenciling. It works well for street and canvas, and whatever else you have on hand, except shirts. For clothing, stick to fabric paint. The key here is practice. Test out your hand and develop a technique before spraying your stencil.
Tulip makes a large variety of fabric paint, and most is not so good for stenciling. The sprayable fabric paint is inconsistent; the white is chunky and the black is runny. The “slick” kind bleeds under the stencil pretty bad. It is a pain in the ass to work with and a waste of money.
Acrylic paints and textile medium get a thumbs up! Make a mixture of 2/3 acrylic paint and 1/3 textile medium. When the paint is dry, heat set it or it will fade away. The only bad thing about this combination is cracking, but most paints do anyway.
Speedball screen printing inks are the best. They are a little more expensive than other paints, but are way better in the long run. No bleeding, no cracking. Jacquard is also good. I always get fantastic results with it.
Puffy paint rocks! Put it on like normal paint, iron it after it is dry and it gets puffy.
Bleach is an unconventional “paint” for stenciling, but if done properly can come out awesome. Check out the bleach t-shirt tutorial for more info. Bleach pen however will not give good results.
This tip in from Marissa:
I tried aerosol fabric paint. The brand was Simply Spray. I cut a small stencil out of freezer paper, ironed it down, and tested it out. The results were very unsatisfactory. The paint saturates too much. It soaked through the freezer paper and spread all over the shirt. I’m going to definitely check out the screen printing ink.
