Tutorial: Painting and weathering leather! (Patreon)

For my latest cosplay I am doing Carlos from Disneys Descendants and I need it done ASAP, while I could sew on each panel and have all these different kinds of leather for this it is much faster and easier to just paint it on! And that is what we are going to be doing today.

Now, I suggest to NOT use acrylic paints as your base for something like this, where the fabric can stretch, only because the acrylic paint will crack and you will need to do constant touchups on your cosplay due to this.

Before I get into that lets start with our base! I cut apart this leather jacket, just a basic one I found from goodwill!

Carlos's jackets is rather detailed, having red, white and black parts of the jacket all over the place. To get the color right where we want it we are gonna need LOTS of tape. Tape down the parts of the leather you do not want to get paint on, this is a fast and easy way to get a perfect edge for your paint and can work with anything you're painting honestly!

The paint I use for this is Design Masters Floral paint, this paint has a mix of latex in it and is MEANT to move with whatever you apply it to, which makes it perfect for clothing, especially vinyls/leather. I have not tried this on regular cotton like fabric so I am unsure about applying it on something like that.

Now go ahead and spray down your paint! I had to do a slight layer of white first and then do the red to make the red more vibrant.

Let it dry and go ahead and remove the tape and you should have a rather clean line of paint! Sometimes the paint will manage to go under the tape but you can easily touch that up later. I used this same tape/paint method for the whole jacket for all the base colors!

After you have all your base colors done you can now go back in and detail paint/clean up the edges! For this I did use acrylic paints, using them to detail/clean up your edges is a much better method for using acrylics on this type of material in my opinion!

For all the shadows/weathering all I did was use a technique called dry brushing!

Dry brushing is when you dip your brush into your paint then rub the excess amount of paint onto another surface, I used paper. Then when you have just a small amount of paint left, where when you rub it on the paper it looks grungy/messy, that is when you will then start painting in the grunge/shadows/weathering, to give your fabric a more textured/lived in feeling! I do this method of dry brushing on everything I paint!

I hope this gives you some help/ideas for your next cosplay! I know its rather simple when looking at it like this but it is something that when I learned how to do it really changed how I look at crafting and helps me so much!!

AFTER ALL IS DONE! PLEASE! MAKE sure to seal your paint!! The spray paint will still have fumes from it and you do not want to be inhaling that stuff! Also always wear a mask while applying the paint, please do not breathe in those fumes, also make sure to work outdoors or somewhere that is well ventilated.

P.S.

It works on leather/vinyl shoes as well! <3 The black shoes is the before and the red one is the after!