So I painted on some bandanas...

This idea is hardly new but, much like my plague doctor mask I just wanted to make them.
I'd seen an Oni bandana on the net before, I also had a couple of plain black bandanas lying around. So naturally I had a go at making my own. And because I don't have a silkscreen printer, nor do I have the space (or any real reason to own one) I painted it by hand.

First things first, sketch a pattern. And because it's me it's ball-point pen on a scrap of paper...

I then re-drew it slightly bigger and on a slightly thicker paper. The bits that were to be painted were cut out with a fine point craft knife.

I transfered the pattern to the bandana by tracing the outline with a white pencil. I traced one half then flipped the paper over to create the other half. Doing it this way meant that the facial features stayed in the correct position (if I cut out the entire pattern, the mouth part would be floating about on its own).

Transfered onto the bandana. And because I'm doing this by hand it's not entirely symmetrical, but that's fine. Next, painting...

I mixed acrylic paint with this GAC 900 fabric painting medium. This makes the paint thinner and more flexible which means that it's less likely to crack and peel when washed.

However it produces formaldehyde when setting, so open a window!

A few thin coats of paint...

...and a few minutes pressed under a hot iron and it's done. In my limited experience of doing this type of thing painting light colours onto dark fabric generally takes more coats than dark paint on light. The paint usually ends up showing on the opposite side due to the amount of paint needed, but since this a one-side only thing it doesn't really matter.

At least this time I can show you what it looks like when worn :P


I also made a skull version. I wanted to paint the skull one first, but because I saw the oni mask version I had to start with that.

I had this stretchy skull tube-scarf-type thing, it looked a lot like this:

In fact this is the exact same design that I bought off of a Bay that starts with an "e". I liked the idea of this, however I didn't realise that the skull was printed IN THE MIDDLE of the scarf. This meant that if you wanted to wear it like the polystyrene foam head is modelling, you have to fold it which meant doubling its thickness and halving its length. I ended up gifting this to my cousin, then bought some plain bandanas to recreate this skull scarf in bandana form.

Anyway the skull one was made with pretty much the same method as the oni mask one, except that the pattern wasn't symmetrical. I found a half-skull picture (the same one printed on that scarf above), created a template from it and traced it onto the bandana. Then hand-painted it, leaving gaps for the contours and outlines.

It ended up a little bigger than I envisioned, but seeing as it only cost a few squid and a few hours of my time I wasn't complaining. In time for Halloween? Yeah, I suppose.


(Back in December!)