At our girl’s camp last week, our camp director made shirts for the girl’s. They were a white t-shirt with a line drawing designed by one of the young women.

We originally were going to leave as the line art, but the camp director asked if they young women would like to personalize them with color. They said they’d love to, so when we got to camp, the first morning they worked on coloring in their shirt designs. The camp director had found these Artistro fabric markers on Amazon for a good price.

I was actually pretty surprised by how well they worked. They have 2 different tips, a brush tip on one end, and a liner tip on the other end. They claimed to be no-bleed, and in fact, they didn’t bleed. We started out with cardstock in between the front and back, but the colors didn’t go through to the cardstock. They also didn’t bleed beyond the borders of the printed design.

The colors were vibrant right from the start. My t-shirt below (sorry, not the best picture) I went with a more muted palette, muted purples with a little punch of blue and yellow on the smaller flowers. We were able to layer colors on top of each other and achieve depth to the design, like in the flowers, pedals, and leaves. The lighter colors would easily paint over the darker ones and vise versa for highlights and shadows throughout.

Once the design was finished being colored in, it did leave the fabric feeling a bit stiff. The directions said to let the paint dry for 24 hours before washing. That was not hard as we had 2 1/2 more days of camp left. The girl’s did however wear the shirts in between and they never smudged or smeared.

Once home, I threw mine in the washer to see how it would turn out. It worked perfectly, it didn’t fade, bleed into areas around the painted areas or onto any other items in my laundry (fortunately!). Once washed, the fabric was soft, even where the paint had been applied. I have only washed it once, but I was impressed with this first washing.

They have several different paint pen sets, the one I ordered is primarily for fabric. The ones we had at camp also worked for painting on rocks, glass, wood, etc. I would definitely recommend these markers for your next t-shirt project, especially for detail work. You can find them at Michael’s but they’re quite a bit more expensive than on Amazon, which is 36 makers for $10 currently.

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