Thursday, March 8, 2012

Silvered jeans

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Here's the most experimental DIY I've done for this blog. As you probably know, it's a subtle adaptation of metallic brights trend for summer or spring. I chose white jeans for this, but you can do this with any other garment.

This is a quite easy project, it doesn't require any special artistic skill or even having super steady hands. The most difficult issue will be to find the right paint, but I'll make that step easier for you guys, as I experimented a lot for this post.


These are the three kinds of paint I tried
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_ Acrylic: the result is not bad at all, but the finish is semi-matte. Those paints usually have little glittery sparkles. 

_ Oil Colour: I had silver oil paint at home, so I tried it on fabric. It provides a nice metallic finish but it takes at least four days to dry, so I do not recommend using it. You might get unwanted paint marks.

_ Aluminum enamel: you'll find it in a hardware store. It's a special paint for exteriors, very resistant to severe weather conditions, so I guess it also resists the washing machine. It dries fast, but you should use it very carefully in a ventilated place.

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From my own experience, I know that most of silver paints for crafts don't provide the shiny finish I was looking for, at least they don't work well on fabrics. So I directly went to a hardware store and got aluminum enamel.

I thought I had the perfect paint and I tried it on my white jeans.  The result was ¡simply awful! It looked like a dirty matte grey, there was no satin or sparkly finish at all... So I decided to get over my DIY disappointment and tried acrylic paint.

What I got with acrylic paint looked well, but was far away from the effect I wanted. So when it dried, I decided to give a second chance to the aluminum enamel and put a layer of it over the acrylic. I had nothing to loose, as my jeans were almost ruined... But fortunately, I found the perfect solution by chance; the acryclic is a kind of plastic paint that worked as a primer on the fabric. Then, the aluminum enamel I put over, stayed on the surface and looked shiny and metallic, just as I wanted

If you want your lines to look straight and accurate you can use tape. I didn't do it because I wanted the brush strokes to show, I think it looks more artistic and interesting. This is also the reason why I used oil brushes, which are hard an rough, instead of the classic soft and fluffy brushes.



1 comment:

  1. Have you tried this on blue jeans in any other colors , like red or turquoise? If I don’t want a shiny look, don’t you think the acrylic would be ok on its own ?

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