hancock my belovedd

Steps 1 to 5 are mostly about how I made the image itself. Steps 6 to 9 are about making a patch once you have your final image. Skip ahead if you need!

So here's the supplies I personally use for these patches -

Tulip fabric paint, black and white

Talc powder

Charcoal powder

Tracing paper

Paintbrush

Fine-tip squeeze bottles

Fabric

My computer

Tape

A thumbtack

A pencil

And to be clear, these are NOT the only options. I've done this with black or white acrylic paint instead of fabric paint, it works fine. If you don't want to bother with the squeeze bottles you can use a paintbrush instead. If you don't have talc powder, cornstarch would work. If you can't find powdered charcoal, you can crush some up like I did, or use graphite, or literally whatever. You get the idea.

If you're going to be using the fine-tip squeeze bottles, now is the time to put your paint (fabric or acrylic) into the bottles and thin them with water to your level of comfort. You WILL need to test the paint on some fabric first, to be sure you can apply it evenly and that it flows well. If you're going to use acrylics, I highly suggest you add a drop of retardant to the mix ALONG with water.

2. I find my images for the figure I'm drawing. Yes, we're tracing: this ain't fine art and we're not gonna be snobs. Here we have John Hancock from the game and John Hancock IRL Danny Shorago.

3. I trace my images! You may notice my two reference images are the same pose! I'm gonna trace the first one by taping my paper over my computer screen and drawing LIGHTLY.

When I had the basics for Danny's proportions down, I left the paper where it was and moved the image of Hancock underneath the paper and traced what I needed from that image. That gets me this double-layer image.

4. I decide which of these lines I want to keep. Even with the faces for John and Danny lined up proportionally the shoulders and neck length of the two figures are pretty different. I decided that I wanted to go with narrower shoulders, and free-handed in the ruffles for his shirt.

5. Now I merge the two faces. I have to get the skin texture from John onto the face I have, which is mostly Danny. I kept up a whole screen of reference images for this process so I could decide what I wanted to pull from where.

And I leaned hard into the skull for his cheekbones and nose. You can see I actually used a colored pencil to outline those skull-like elements before I chose my final lines, and used another piece of my own darn art to add a chin scar I just really like. It is NOT a bad idea to trace a SECOND COPY of this image AT THIS TIME. Your image will be getting really dirty and messed up in the future, so unless you want to start over, you should make a spare copy (spoiler: I didn't do that and had to do this whole thing a second time to make a second patch...)

6. Align your fabric and your tracing paper up and tape first the fabric down THEN the paper on top, separately.

7. Poke holes! Use your thumbtack to poke holes along the lines you're trying to transfer. The way I'm doing this patch most of the image is white lines on black fabric, with SOME black lines on white for his face, neck, and shirt. For that reason, my transfer process is gonna be in TWO parts, one to lay down the white portions and then later to put the black lines ON TOP of the white areas as needed. I don't have a photo for this step: poke holes, you know how to do that.

8. Apply talc/powder to the image and use a paintbrush to gently brush the talc over the surface. You can use the brush perpendicular to the surface to GENTLY push the powder into the holes from the thumbtack holes.

9. Peel off the paper GENTLY. As you can see, I didn't even poke holes for the lines in his face, just the outlines for what's going to be painted in white. What you have is a little connect-the-dots to apply white paint to.

10. Apply white paint and allow to DRY COMPLETELY.

11. Once the white paint it TOTALLY DRY you're going to repeat steps 7 to 9, poking holes in the locations that you want to have BLACK lines appear. For me that's the details on his face and shirt. Instead of talc, the powder I used was crushed vine charcoal. You can see I'm starting to apply the black paint along the lines of black spots of charcoal.

12. Add, like, words and stuff! Also clean up, and fine tune, etc. You did awesome, and if it didn't turn out, well you DEFINITELY made a spare copy like I suggested you do in step 5, right?!?! Right.

Some notes:

This process also works on tee shirts if you want, but definitely use the fabric paint and not acrylics or the paint will flake off when you wash the clothing. Instead of taping the shirt down, I suggest you thumbtack it to a board or to some thick cardboard to keep it still while you work.

If you don't have a computer/screen you can trace on then print the images you want to work with and tape them to a window to use as alight-box.

You don't need to use the charcoal, honestly. If the design is simple or you're feeling like a BAMF, you can skip the black paint and the black powder and just use the negative space of the black fabric instead.

Tracing, and I cannot say this clearly enough, is not cheating when you're not tracing someone else's art. Trace a face. Trace a figure. Trace a landscape. I don't care. If you're tracing any image, you're going to need to do a lot of work to make your shitty traced image (my step 3) into something that looks like art (my step 5). That act of work, that's making art. Congratulations.

If you made it this far and REALLY want to donate money to me over this, don't! Maybe donate to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund instead at pcrf.net because that'd be SUPER cool.