I love the idea of painting clothes for one-of-a-kind fashion. Previously, I had painted a blazer with a Mondrian pattern.
To create the Mondrian blazer above, I bought a cheap blazer from Uniqlo and painted it with DecoArt So Soft fabric paint. I wanted to paint another blazer with flowers, so I bought another blazer on sale from Uniqlo (I think it was $29). Here is what the blazer looked like beforehand.
It was a nice lightweight cotton. Although I had a good experience with DecoArt So Soft paint before, it’s kind of hard to find and I wanted paint that was a bit more opaque, so I did some online searches for suggestions and decided to try Liquitex Soft Body acrylics and fabric medium. You mix them in a 1 to 1 ratio, and the fabric medium keeps the paint from cracking.
I have lots of paint left over from this project because I didn’t need that much, but I did use almost 3 four-ounce bottles of the fabric medium. To paint the blazer, I started with the back because I figured if it didn’t look good, it would be the back and people wouldn’t notice as much. I laid the blazer on a large plastic drop cloth outside because I didn’t have room in my studio to spread out a blazer. Usually when beginning a flower painting I would paint a chaos layer on the canvas as the underlayer for the flowers. But I wanted to avoid having extra paint layers on the blazer or otherwise it would be too stiff. So I just painted an underlayer in spots that I designated for flowers. Then I painted greenery around those underlayers. Here’s how it looked at this initial stage.
Notice that the under layers are orange and peach colored. The finished flowers would not be that color, but I wanted these initial colors to peek through the final color to give the flowers more depth and interest. Next, I painted the background color of the blazer. I chose a light blue, and this went over some of the greenery and the rest of the background of the blazer. (Disregard the box of pour-on resin in the picture. I used it as a paperweight because it was windy that day.)
Then I painted the actual pink flowers on top of the orange under layers. Unfortunately, I forgot to take any more photos at this point, but you get the idea. After painting the main flowers, I added smaller details, shading and highlights.
You can see it really wasn’t hard to paint on the blazer. The biggest challenge was I had to do the whole thing in small sections because I had to let the paint dry before moving on. So it took patience to get through the whole blazer. I started with the back. Then moved to the front, doing the left and right sides at the same time. Then I tackled the fronts of the sleeves and then the backs of the sleeves. Finally I finished with the lapels and the collar. Each time I started from the beginning, doing the under layers, then the greenery, the blue background, and then the pink flowers.
Oh, by the way, I put masking tape over the buttons so I wouldn’t get paint on them. I love how this turned out. If you’re wondering if it’s really stiff because of the paint, I have to be honest that it is actually a little stiff, but not so rigid that you can’t move around in it. The fabric medium does soften the paint considerably, and I can scrunch and fold the fabric endlessly and there is no cracking or anything. And when I’m wearing it, it doesn’t feel that different from a normal blazer. In fact, the more I wear it, the softer it seems to get.
I just love how it turned out. There will definitely be more painted blazers in the future for me.
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