Newt tattoo sleeve master post! ‘Cause some people asked? SURE.

Supplies:

- Art guide! (Sure, there’s screenshots and art book concept art, but they weren’t great solid guides. So I took a shit ton of refs and made my own and tried to be as screen accurate as possible. If my art guide can help you, please use and abuse it! That’s what it’s there for!)

- American Apparel Opaque Pantyhose (or whatever. pick your poison. i bought, like 8 pairs of pantyhose of various types to test on before picking one)

-Copic markers (a bunch of green, a bunch of yellow, a bunch of red, a bunch of blue, a very very very very light blue to fill in the areas that would be white, and a warm grey 9 to solidify outside linework)

- SetaSkrib Fabric Markers (two reds - a lighter and a darker, and a yellow)

- Graphite (for the initial outline)

- A whole lot of patience

Step-by-step (at least, what I can remember):

- Tell husband, Steve, he’s going to be Newt and that he should deal with it.

- Test out markers and stuff on a couple different pantyhose types. I decided on the opaque white ones to retain color integrity (and because American Apparel is right near where I work, so it was easy).

- Cut pantyhose in half so you have a right and left, cut off excess on top, cut off foot. You could probably make a thumb hook if you wanted, but given I used white pantyhose, we couldn’t do that without making him look weird.

- Have significant other wear the pantyhose on their arms as you work (to reduce the chance of any image warping). Or create some sort of arm form. I mean, my husband sat for a total of almost 10-12 hours which isn’t a great thing to force someone to do.

- Use graphite pencil to rough in the design. (This step was GREAT given that I used white pantyhose. The pencil showed up very well.)

- If wearing on self or someone else while you work, prepare to get marker bleedthrough ALL OVER YOUR ARM.

- COLOR THAT SHIT IN. The three fabric pens I bought were a significant portion of the base, whereas all the blues and greens were copic markers. My fabric pens were running out of ink near the end. I’d suggest having some backups just in case.

Miscellaneous:

- Bleeding was almost non-existent (well, there WAS a small amount, but pausing and letting things dry out make this problem minimal). One of the arms, however, was stretched a bit more than the other, and I did notice that the coloring was far less sharp on that side. I mean, you probably can’t notice from the pictures, but if you’re a perfectionist like I am, it’ll bug you. Try and stretch each pantyhose over the arm as close as possible to each other.

- Use body tape to hold the upper part and lower part in place. We put body tape around Steve’s mid-upper arm and around his wrist. Doesn’t damage the fabric, and sticks things pretty well and good, even if you’re sweating all day.

- The arm tattoos CAN BLEED ON OTHER FABRIC! If you look closely, you can see that Steve got some red on his sleeves. Haven’t washed that shirt yet, so not sure how it will fare up, but whatever. That shirt was, like, $14 so we weren’t that upset. No other bleeding on pants or backpack or anything. We figured it was just the continuous friction between shirt and pantyhose. I might try and use some fixative spray on them and see if that helps.

- Ahahahaha and since we were at PAX (Penny Arcade Expo), the free swag capitol of the world, Steve kept being asked what booth was giving out the sleeve tattoos. So… I guess I did too good of a job?