Stenciling Phoenix Wright: An Illustrated Guide!

Possibly my favorite Christmas gift this year was a t-shirt stenciling kit assembled by Mary-- acrylic paint,
fabric-paint medium, freezer paper, foam brushes, and two t-shirts. She also typed up instructions, and staple-bound them zine-style. Mary is pretty awesome.



While we were visiting family, I spent my downtime working on stencil ideas (made so much easier by my new laptop!)-- listing possible sources, collecting images, seeing what they would look like on a t-shirt, and such-- and decided on Phoenix Wright for my first shirt.


These are the materials I used for the project: acrylic paint, some kind of junk that makes acrylic paint work better on fabric, some freezer paper, and my rusty old X-Acto knife (horror movie script pending.) The shirts, instructions, and paint were wrapped together in a gift box; the freezer paper was wrapped separately, and opened first. I didn't exactly know how to react to my gift of freezer paper-- well, I knew how to react (with surprise and delight) but I kind of got the feeling that I was being asked to do housework of some kind via the communication medium of "gift." I was very pleased when this turned out not to be the case.

This is the design, based on graphics ripped from the game (found at Court Records, an excellent Phoenix Wright fansite) and printed as large as it could be on one sheet of paper. The printer decided to cut off some of the picture, and it chose an area that nobody would pay much attention to, the finger, which isn't the focal point of the whole fucking picture or anything. I suppose it could have been my mistake, instructing my
program to "fit to page" and assuming that the picture would then fit on the page it was being printed onto. It's like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger, or you will miss all the heavenly glory.

Were you wondering what the freezer paper was for? Probably not, because everyone who can successfully navigate to this blog is smarter than I am. Anyway, I found out after reading the instructions that it adheres temporarily to fabric when ironed on, making it a (presumably) cheap transfer medium for stencils, plus it's translucent so you can easily trace and cut your designs from another sheet of paper. This picture is of the stencil ironed onto the shirt. I kind of like the way it looks in this state, and probably would have kept it, if the freezer paper were not so likely to fall off after the first wash. Oh, and also, wearing freezer paper is for food, and I AM NOT FOOD.

Then I mixed up the paint and the fabric medium and dabbed the mixture onto the shirt-- no dragging for some reason!


A few minutes later, I had a shirt covered in sticky goop! YES. Oh, and incidentally the sticky goop is in the image of the main character from a semi-obscure Nintendo DS graphical text adventure.


Now all I have to do is wait a week (!) for the paint to dry, and then heat set it with the iron, and I will be dressin' in my custom-designed fly threadzz!