Body Art Airbrush Tattoo: Koi Fish

In this project, I’ll show you how I painted the body art airbrush tattoo shown above.

For this project you will need the following:

• your airbrush equipment
• a selection of paints designed for painting on skin
• a body part
• thin marker
• exacto knife
• scrap white paper

Scroll down when you are ready to start!

Step 1

First I picked a design… the koi fish shown below. I sketched this one myself based on several images I saw on the internet.

Notice the design is closed. That is, it makes one solid shape… having a solid shape helps when making stencils.

Step 2

Next I used an exacto knife to cut all the pieces of the stencil out. You may find it helpful to work in sections – only cutting out what you need, at the time you need it, to keep everything straight.

Step 3

Here I have taped the outer portion of the stencil to the surface.

** This is my own leg I am working on, so I had to use tape to help keep things in place – normally, you would be able to hold it in place with your hand while you painted.

***P.S.: Painting this required some major contortions

Step 4

Use white paint to lightly spray the interior of the stencil. Painting the background a light white really helps the body art airbrush tattoo have colors that POP. Without the white, all additional colors will be muted by the skin color beneath (even though I am grotesquely pale in these photos) – The darker the skin, the less vivid the color.

Step 5

In this step, I have repositioned the stencils so that I can paint in the general area of the koi fish.

Step 6

Using orange paint spray the edges of the stencil lightly. All I am trying to do here is figure out where in all that white space the fish is supposed to be located.

Step 7

Here I have repositioned the stencils so that only the fish is exposed.

Step 8

With the stencils repositioned, I have filled in, fairly opaque, the entire fish in orange.

Step 9

Once the fish is in place, I need to indicate where the flowers are to go. I accomplished this by placing the cut out flower portion of the stencil over where the flowers should go and used blue paint to define their edges.

While I was there, I also lightly marked in all areas that I want blue.

Step 10

Next, I focus on giving the blue water some dimension. Remember that this is the COOL thing about airbrushing – the airbrushes ability to add dimension, depth, shading and movement is what allows the body art airbrush tattoo to look like the real thing.

To add the dimension in this piece, I used multiple shades of blue and white.

Step 11

Now I need to make the koi fish look “round”. Using a darker shade of orange and various pieces of the stencils as masks I shaded the edges of the fish

Step 12

Using an even darker shade of orange, I added scales and more shading to give him(I decided it’s a guy fish) some detail.

Step 13

Here I shaded the flowers with some pink and purple … sadly, it doesn’t show well in the photo.

Step 14

Last step – here I outline everything in black. While I feel this step makes the art look less realistic (not that it looked too real to begin with) it certainly makes it look more like a tattoo.

**I have to apologize for my poor lining – it was difficult to bend over to get close enough to my leg to have better control

And here it is all done!

As you can see, painting a body art airbrush tattoo is very similar to painting any other kind of airbrush painting – it is just on a different canvas – oh, except you can’t use an exacto knife on this particular surface without making a mess