I’ve been doing a lot of fabric painting for my Link cosplay, and one of the things that made my life easier was using templates instead of freehand painting. The templates sped up the already long winded (four coats of paint!) process as I didn’t have to worry as much about blotching and runing the nice sharp edges.

Here’s what I did:

  1. Design your templates. I used Inkscape to draw them out, and printed them onto paper.
  2. Transfer your template to some thin (cereal box thickness) card. I used double sided tape, but you could also glue it.
  3. Add some cellotape to the back of the card. Make sure it completely covers where the template is, as well as a substantial border. This makes the back of your card wipeable, so after each use you can clear away any paint that’s leaked/got stuck when you removed it.
  4. Cut out the template. Make sure you’ve left a big border around it as you’ll need that for a later step. A craft knife or similar is going to make your cuts sharper. Try not to pull any of the cellotape off, and if you do make sure you patch it up. See the picture below for an example of a template I made.
  5. Place the template onto where you want to paint. Stack some heavy objects all around the edge (I used stacks of 2p coins as I have a ton of them since they’re useless these days). Try to make sure that the template is as flat and close to the fabric as possible.
  6. Mix up your paint. I use a fabric medium even though I’m not going to wash it, along with acrylic paint. Don’t forget that thet the paint will often dry darker, and if you’re painting blue onto red you’re going to end up way darker than you expect. Oop’s!
  7. Paint your design. Pressing down firmly on the template around where you’re painting paint your first layer. It’s going to take a lot of paint and look pretty bad, but this is only the first coat. Don’t remove the template until you’ve finished!!
  8. Add more layers. This is going to depend on fabric and paint used, but to get the best coverage I had to do four coats before it looked right.
  9. Wait for the paint to dry a bit, then remove the template. You want the paint to dry enough to not blotch when removed, but not enough that it’s completely stuck.
A line and vee template, cut out of paper and stuck to cardboard with a wide border. It is blotched with off white and blue paint.

A template I used for Link, note plenty of space left for weights around the edges.

Tada! Hopefully you know have sharp edged painted designs on your fabric. They’re not going to be perfect, but much less time consuming than doing so by hand.

A red piece of fabric with a pattern of triangular off white lines accross the edge, with a solid blue triangle in the middle of each of the triangular lines.

Here’s the finished result of the above template, in case you’re curious.