I want to stencil onto fabric. Can I use an air brush with fabric paint onto it?
Yes, that should work ok, as long as you use a light hand on the air brush and your stencil is securely on the surface so that the paint doesn’t get under it if the stencil lifts. I would use spray temporary adhesive to make sure that the stencil doesn’t fly away due to the air brush. You might also want to test this on an old scrap of fabric first, to get the feel of how heavy or light you need to spray, and how well your stencil is going to work. Another consideration is the gold paint–sometimes it’s a bit more grainy than other non-metallic paint and could clog up the spray gun. Sounds like a great project!
Cotton was pretty good – we used stencils for set design for our church’s plays and cotton works pretty good – using white sheets, dying them as needed and then stenciling the designs, like you said, with Fabric paint – worked pretty well to make the gold looking costumes of the Pharisees and Sadducees, the High Priests and whatnot. We sprayed a sort of sealant over the top as well, but I can’t recall what that is right now – I’ll look it up in a minute. But, just as a warning – we had a need for some curtains that needed to be thick and purple and black and so we found some black, polyester curtains and were planning to paint the purple streaks – the paint would not hold no matter what we did – it dried and flaked off. We ended up sewing the streaks in. This wasn’t exactly it, but this is pretty close to the sealer we used: http://www2.thompsonswaterseal.com/products/product_detail.cfm?p
