I have a brown distressed-leather bomber jacket and I want to paint a design on the back. I haven’t had much luck locating any info on the web about this (there’s a little, but most of it seems to assume that you kind of know what you’re doing, which I don’t). Can anybody help me out with the following questions?
How do you prepare the jacket for painting?
What kind of paint do you use?
Where might I be likely to find such paint?
Are there any techniques I should know about (like, for example, paint the design area black or white first then paint on top of that, or use a particular kind of pencil/etc. to draw it in before painting?)
Is there anything I need to do to “fix” the design once I’m done so it doesn’t rub off?
Not painting-related per se, but the design I want to put on the jacket is the logo of a (fake) corporation in a roleplaying game. Any legal issues if this is just a one-off item for my own use?
I don’t know what the best possible advice would be, but I can tell you what I did, and what epeepunk did. And I can give you the results, plus other ideas.
Acrylic paint. Plain and simple. Sketch your design with thinned (with water) paint, with enough contrast to show up, but not so much that you’ll have an obvious oops if you don’t overpaint that spot. I actually just used white, on a black jacket, because I could overpaint with black and have it work. In both cases, there was a degree of splitting/chipping, but that worked with the style of jacket, too - the art didn’t look ‘shiny new’ but it also stuck well enough to really be there (epeepunk did calvin and hobbes way back before they were hot, and I did a medicine shield with totem animals, highly detailed).
Is the leather oil-tanned? That could (maybe) affect whether the paint would adhere well. I’d recommend testing the paint adherance on a hidden inside seam, say, inside the cuff of a sleeve. But the usual top-grain leather (not suede) seems to do fine with just plain old acrylic paint. Heck, suede does, too, though it soaks in more.
You can also buy fabric paints at any craft store. The benefit of using those is that they are highly flexible, so less likely to split or peel, and very adhesive (again, less likely to split or peel). Bonus, they come in small containers, so you don’t have loads of excess floating around, you have a lot of color choices, and they are easy to come by. The only concern I’d have is that because they do stick together so well, if something peeled, it might be a bigger patch that came off. You’d have to test it and see.
Oh, and in either case, no need to ‘fix’ the design. Once it is dry, it is done. Give it plenty of time to dry, though.
Also, if the logo doesn’t exist as someone else’s logo, and you don’t put a ™ or ® mark on it, it is just art, plain and simple. No legal issues for art, right?
Oh, wait - it is a pre-existing logo made by the company that produced the role-playing game?
In that case, you might want to call the publisher and ask. In general, items for your own use that are not also produced by the owner of the logo will be let slide, even if there are technically legal issues they could hit you with. But, say, they make and sell leather jackets with the logo on them… And it depends on whether they see your use as free advertising for their product (the game) or competition with their merchandising efforts. Or if they think you will botch the job and make their logo look like crud. Etc. Also, the smaller the company the more likely they’ll be thrilled to have you paint it on your jacket (IME with copyright issues).
Thanks for the info! BTW, I seem to recall in my reading that it’s necessary to scuff up the leather before painting–is this right, and if so, what would I need to use to do it?
The logo is that of a fictional corporation that’s part of an RPG game world. It definitely exists already. I have no intention of selling copies of the jacket or profiting from it in any way–I just think it’s a cool logo and I want it on my jacket.