I stumbled upon this amazing face dress when surfing Anthropologie’s website a few months ago.

Immediately I knew I was not willing to pay out the $450 US that was required to own such a cool piece. Instead, I thought I’d DIY that sucker.

Painted Face Dress DIY

I already had a black slip dress from a few years back.

The Anthropologie dress that provided the inspiration for this project is beaded and that is what I thought I wanted to try to do.

These were the materials I put together to do the project initially.

 

Scratch that idea.

Don’t bother with all those beads, it was a nightmare.

It took FOREVER to sew on the beads and the fabric puckered horribly. The whole thing looked very unprofessional.  I finished the nose and hated it. Removing the beads afterwards took almost as much time as sewing them on. ARGH!!!  The plight of the DIY’er.

Start over.

Instead, I decided to simply paint directly on the dress. So much easier!

Materials required:

Black slip dress, acrylic paints in multiple colours of your choosing (you can buy fabric paint but I don’t think it is necessary) and a white pencil crayon for sketching.

Method:

1. Sketch your design directly onto the dress with the white pencil.
2. Once you are satisfied with your sketch paint directly on the dress.
3. Be sure to place a piece of cardboard under the area you are painting otherwise the paint will bleed through to the other side of the dress.
4. You can heat set the paint by simply putting it in the dryer afterwards however it has been my experience that once you paint that acrylic onto fabric it’s there forever.
5. The dress is fine to be washed, removing any white pencil sketch marks that remain.

 

I’m really pleased with how it turned out.

 

I painted the initial sketch with just one line.

Afterwards I decided to go back around and paint small dots on the inside and outside of those lines mimicking the beading and thickening the image.

 

I’ve layered a turtleneck under the slip dress as we are well into cooler cold temperatures now.

(groan)

Oh how I hate winter.

The vintage red boots are for sale in my Etsy store FYI.

 

I’ve got a little collection of 1980s-90s red boots in my store now as they are so on trend.

Besides…who doesn’t like wearing red boots?

They sass up whatever you’re wearing, like an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence.

Plus it is well known fact that wearing powerful red Super Woman boots means you can jump tall buildings in a single bound.

Or in my case, chubby pugs.

Same difference.

I’m thinking about shortening the dress a bit. It looks fine when I’m wearing tall boots or when I stretch but I can’t go around stretching all day.

Unless there are a bunch of 70% dark chocolate bars hanging from the ceiling.

Yeah, I’d stretch all day long for that no problemo.

Have you ever painted on clothing?

If so, did it turn out?

 

Here are some other DIY projects I’ve created by painting on fabric; painted jean jackets, painted jeans, doodled jeans, painted t-shirt.

 

Linking up with the lovely Patti over at Visible Monday.