Would it be okay if I used t-shirt transfer for light fabrics on dark fabrics? Would it mess up the colours and such?
I’d think your biggest problem would be visibility (or the lack thereof) and some of the lighter colors in the transfer might be hard to see against a dark background.
If you are using a light fabric transfer, more likely than not it’s treating the white in your image as “transparent”, so you’d have a pretty nasty image if you tried it on dark fabric. Light colours like yellow would probably not show up very well and everything else would be dark.
The transfers for dark fabrics IMO do not work as well, as they have to have some kind of white layer to work with between that and the transfer. For dark fabrics screen printing really is the only way to go. (And it’s my understanding that for dark fabrics they make a white screen to go under your design anyway, so the colours stay true.)
I’m assuming you’re talking about iron-on/heat transfer paper, here.
Yes, I will be using the iron-on/heat transfer papers. I can’t afford screen printing right now, although I wish I could because it’s much better. So, I’m guessing it would just be better if I bought the paper for dark fabrics, too?
Yes. As butter pie explained, it’s a matter of transparency of color versus opacity.
You need 100% opaque colors to work on black fabric. Opaque colors will of course work on any color fabric. But transparent colors will be distorted by anything but white. Even with screen printing, when it’s printed on black, there’s usually an additional charge for laying down a white layer first, so the colored inks can be printed on white, like a canvas.
Okay, so for the dark transfer paper, the colours are opaque, meaning the fabric colour will not show through. So, if there are white areas in the printed design, will it show up as white on the t-shirt?