Sleeve Process | alisainks

If you know that the end goal for your arm is a sleeve, it’s best to communicate that upfront for best results. Sleeves that can be fully planned out from the beginning have the ability to be the most cohesive and compositionally sound.

consultations are essential to making sure that you and your artist are on the same page.

Bring reference photos of completed sleeves or art styles you enjoy. Focus on overall aesthetic, not the subject matter.

There’s many possibilities when it comes to how you can approach the process... to figure out what would be best in your case, I tell clients to create a list of their essential elements and then the parts they are a bit more flexible on.

Where I ask people to have the most flexibility is in regards to composition and how the elements are interacting with each other. I want to make sure that all elements are properly sized for where they will be sitting and flow with the anatomy of the person wearing them.

i always either take photos of the clients arm or have them send me photos of their arm if they aren’t local. i do this to make sure i am designing for your anatomy specially! this is not a one size fits all situation by any means - everyone’s Arm is different and we want to make sure it fits you perfectly. i design directly onto the photos so you can see exactly where everything sits before we get going.

I will be using a sleeve projected completed in the past to show you the process from beginning to end.

with this specific project, i gave the client three very similar designs with some slight differences for her to pick from and she ended up picking the middle design. She gave me a list of florals and bugs that she wanted to include and these were the designs I came up with.

With stenciling sleeves, things may not always fall as anticipated. I typically do a combination of stenciling and freehanding to make sure all elements are interacting seamlessly with one another.

This can mean that stenciling can take 1-2 hours for large scale work. I really like to take my time during this process to set a good foundation for the rest of the process.

after we finish the stenciling, we attempt to line out as much of the sleeve as we can in one session. Results vary by Project, sometimes we only line out a portion of the design and then use the second session to finish the lineout.

Here you can see the progress after two shading sessions, we finished all the blackwork and a good amount of the grey shading but not all elements are fully flushed out. In this particular situation we actually did two days back to back since I was traveling to work on this project.

4-5 sessions is my average for black and grey sleeves, they can take up to 7 sessions and color sleeves take around 7-9 sessions. Each session is typically 4-7 hours.

Timeline: I recommend at least one month in between sessions for healing when it comes to my style - so depending on how many sessions your project requires, it can take 4-9 months to complete if you are consistent with appointments.

please remember that each sleeve project will look different based on complexity of your design, if you’re getting color, how long each session spans, and your anatomy.

this is just my process and how i go about doing things! Each artist is different but should give you a good understanding of what their process looks like and what you can expect along the way!

Thank you so much for reading! Hope this was helpful & happy sleeve planning!