After my first foray into two-tone stencils I decided to try something a little more complicated. Which then turned out to be a great deal more complicated. I never learn, apparently.

I decided I needed a t-shirt with the Enterprise sweeping majestically across it, as you do. The first hurdle came when I discovered that photoshop won't print a large image over multiple pages without a fight. (Thank goodness I'm related to a graphic designer.) Once that was dealt with this, of course, resulted in a very large and very delicate stencil, which, of course, the cat wanted to attack. So once I had rescued the stencil from furry, clawy doom it would all be plain sailing, right? Wrong. Grey fabric paint seems to be an endangered species, so I had to mix that colour myself. And matching the second stencil up proved to be quite annoying. (To the extent that it became a stencil made of five separate, overlapping pieces.) And I hurt my arm by holding it too tense to try and get perfect lines. And... And.. I'll stop moaning now.

In the end, as ever, it turned out really quite pretty. It would seem that I have some sort of ridiculous need to hate a project whilst actually doing it, in order for it to turn out well. I'm not sure that's a good thing. But my Enterprise t-shirt is beautiful and I love her! So nyeh.



The t-shirt has the whole floaty, asymmetric thing going on, so the Enterprise sort of wraps around me. From some angles it looks a bit strange and abstract, but from others it shows itself off nicely. I hadn't anticipated that, but I like it.



It kinda looks like the Enterprise is about to attack my head, doesn't it?



I'm particularly pleased with how clear and precise the lettering came out - sometimes when you make a mistake or something gets smudged in the design you can go back later and touch it up, but that's often much harder to do with something you don't paint on, something that's more like negative space. But this, thankfully, came out lovely.

This picture's the only one where you can see the slight hint of something that's a little more obvious with the naked eye - sparkly lens flare on the nacelles!



One more pic and then I'll stop!



Many more photos here (I went even more snap-happy than usual with this one!)

If anyone would like me to do a tutorial on this sort of thing (like I did for "bleached-out" t-shirt designs) please let me know and I'd be happy to oblige!