The Flag Painting Tutorial

We just had our first competition of the 2014 marching band season--it went well, by the way.  I coach the color guard, as I have for the past  twelve years.  This year, I tried a few do-it-yourself projects to get the guard all decked out for their shows.  A mom sewed our uniforms, I made our hairpieces, and we painted our own set of flags.

It's this last project--painting the flags--that was the most difficult.  There are very few guard flag painting tutorials online, let alone any with good instructions that share exactly which products to use and which to avoid.  I did find a great one that demonstrates how to paint your own faded flag. (Click here).  And this one shows how to use acrylics. It is my goal to contribute a helpful flag painting experience to the world wide web.  Here goes:

STEP 1:  Supplies

 - 8 white poly china silk flags -- We used these from Band Shoppe in white: http://www.bandshoppe.com/catalog/productDetail.do?p=In_Stock_Arc_Poly_China_Silk_Budget_Flags

- Paint: Design Master Brand TintIT in Sapphire
I actually bought $40 worth of various paints in my attempt to find the best product for our purposes.  Acrylic is too heavy for painting large designs.  I think Acrylic would be good in small amounts like the writer of this blog post did.  The TintIT worked best, though it was a bit difficult to work with.  (More on that later).

Paints that did not work: (1) Tulip Brand Fabric Spray Paint -- it was not right for our project but might be okay for others.  I'm not sure it would show up well on both sides like the TintIT did. (2) Simply Spray Stencil Paint, Glimmer-Gold -- it turned out really bad on our poly china silk.  The gold shimmer TintIT did the same thing where a really ugly seepage spread out from the gold--really messing up the design.  We think this may have something to do with the shimmer aspect of the paint not allowing it to dry cleanly.  It is also possible that we didn't use the stencil paint correctly. (3)  We also did not use the Krylon because I didn't want our flags to be stiff.  I did use regular spray paint when I made baseball flags many years ago.  It seemed to work okay, though the design was smaller and stiffness wouldn't have been a big issue.

STEP 2: The Process

We had two test flags where we tried out different designs and paints.  We were aiming for some sort of cloud design that could be slightly different on each flag--just like actual clouds are slightly different from each other.  After experimenting for awhile, we decided to keep it simple with a swirly pattern that was similar but different on each flag.  We used the Sapphire TintIT and sprayed the flags while they laid flag on the ground on a tarp.  The paint dries quickly, but picked up the pattern on the tarp as it dried.  We then had the girls hold the flags up off the tarp as it dried--which led to pooling and dripping if we didn't hold it completely level. We did two coats to get the color we wanted. Thankfully, any mistakes and pooling defects aren't noticeable from the stands and the flags turned out quite well.

One of the test flags

I definitely recommend using TintIT for flags.  I have not washed the flags after painting and I probably won't--to be honest.  I'm not sure what would happen and don't want to find out in the middle of our season.  I'll keep adding photos of the flags in action on the field, but for now, this one will have to do.  Two of my guard members helped me out and posed for this photo after our first competition today!