Airbrush T Shirt Project: Simple Heart and Lettering

For this airbrush t shirt project I will show you how I painted the shirt shown above.

For this project you will need the following:

• your airbrush equipment
• a selection of paints
• a t-shirt
• thin marker
• water color pencil
• opaque projector (or drawing skills)
• scrap white paper

Scroll down when you are ready to start!

Step 1

Grab a piece of paper and a pencil and draw your design. I am not a drawer so it took me multiple tries to get the lettering right.

Step 2

Using the thin marker, outline the the image.

Step 3

Project the image onto the t-shirt stretched over a board. Trace your sketch using a watercolor pencil. The watercolor pencil will wash out later (and will mostly be covered by your art work)

Step 4

Mix a pink-y color and outline the heart. If your lines are a little wavy – don’t frett…. you can clean them up later.

Also, this is a good time to say: Even though the pro’s work at break-neck speed, you are not required to. Take your time.

Step 5

Fill in the heart with the pink color – keeping it darker around the edges and lighter in the middle section. Remember the cool thing about airbrush T shirts is the gradients of color.

Step 6

Now switch to a dark transparent purple. Outline the heart again and shade the inside edges of the heart giving it more volume. Also, spray purple around the outside of the heart to make it POP a little.

Step 7

OK… lettering. Don’t panic.

When you are first starting lettering can be really intimidating, but this is the way to tackle it.

As thinly as you can, use black paint to spray over the traced letters. Don’t worry about waves – we’ll fix them.

Step 8

Now repeat….stay as thin as you possible can. Work to even out the lines and waves.

Step 9

All right. Now let’s fancy them up a bit!

Slowly thicken all the DOWN strokes of your letters. You don’t have to go around the whole letter again, just thicken the downstrokes only.

Take as many passes as necessary to get it looking the way you like.

Step 10

Now add some white to punch it up!

A little white dot with a fade on each of the letters makes a huge difference. The goal is to make the black lettering look glossy.

Step 11

This photo shows all the white dots in place. Also add some white highlights to the heart to give it a little gloss too.

Step 12

And again, here is the finished product. Now all that is left to do is heat-set it!