With decoupage techniques, you can design and make your own decoupage iphone sleeve with any artwork, picture, or photo of your choice. In this page, I will describe a simple set of procedures to put your decoupage art on an iPhone sleeve. I will also tell you the necessary tools and skills you need. But most importantly, you need a bit of patience!

Zhang Da Qian (張大千) and Van Gogh on iPhone sleeves

Tools that you need

First and of course, you have to buy an acrylic sleeve for iPhone from any computer or phone store. Transparent (with no color) sleeves are preferred, such as the one below:


The following are also essential:

• Inkjet printer
• Epson photo-quality inkjet paper
• A pair of scissors
• Sponge brush (or just a small piece of natural sponge)
• Paint brush
• Transfer glaze (basically an acrylic glaze that can transfer a picture from paper to a thin plastic film)
• Hair dryer
• Acrylic paint

Procedure in a nutshell

The idea is to transfer any image (from photos, scanned images, etc.) to a thin transparent plastic film that can be stuck on an transparent acrylic iPhone sleeve. So, first of all, choose an image that you want to put on the sleeve.

STEP 1: Print your image on inkjet paper:

You need to print this image to an appropriate size, i.e., slightly smaller than the sleeve so that the sleeve contains the entire image. The Graphic Converter on Mac is a handy application that allows you to scale your image to any size and print at any resolution to your printer. Any inkjet or color laser printer can be used. I have used a very simple inkjet printer, and I have found that the Epson photo-quality inkjet papers give very good result since the paper tissue can be completely removed and hence the image is completely transferred on a transparent film. I will explain it in a minute.

Now you have your image printed on a piece of inkjet paper.

STEP 2: Apply 10 layers of transfer glaze on the image:

Use a sponge to "paint" a thin layer of transfer glaze on the image. BTW, transfer glaze looks like a kind of liquid glue and you can just paint it on the entire image. When you do this, your sponge must go in only one direction for the entire layer. Then, let it dry. You can speed up the drying time by using a hair dryer, but use cool air only! After it becomes dry, apply another layer of transfer glaze on top of it, in exactly the same way you did it for the first layer. But this time, your sponge should go in an orthogonal direction. For instance, if you painted in an horizontal direction in the previous layer, you should do it in the vertical direction this time.

Repeat the application of transfer glaze 8 to 9 more times, i.e., the inkjet paper will be covered by about 10 layers of transfer glaze. Since you have brushed in horizontal and vertical directions alternately for the different layers, you should see a thin transparent coating with canvas-like texture covering the image on the inkjet paper.

Leave it there for about 10 hours to let it dry thoroughly.

STEP 3: Extract the plastic film of printed image

Cut out the image that you want to place on the iPhone sleeve. This is likely to be a ~3 inch by ~2 inch piece of paper coated with transfer glaze. Then, soak the entire paper in water for 15 minutes, and you should be able to peel off the paper from its coating quite easily. Now, you keep the coating (a thin film with the color image you want) and trash the paper that you peeled off.

Dry the film carefully. Never let it fold to itself because if it sticks itself up, you will never be able to unfold it (it is quite sticky!) and you have to do everything all over again. (Don't worry! Be patient! I failed this step twice!)

So, what you have got now is a thin plastic film with the color image on it. The side where you peeled off the paper is non-sticky, and the other side is sticky and is the face of the image which will be stuck on the inner face of the iPhone sleeve in the next step.

STEP 4: Trasfer to the sleeve

If you have a pair of steady hands, this step is easy. First clean up the sleeve with soap or dish-washing detergent. This is necessary since if the sleeve surface is not clean, the film won't stick on it firmly. Basically you just place the film and carefully press it on the inside of the iPhone sleeve, with sticky side of the film inward of course.

STEP 5: Paint the rest of the sleeve with acrylic paint

The final step is to paint up the entire sleeve with acrylic paint. The hard part of this step is to match the background color of your image. You need some experience. The acrylic paint I used is Winsor & Newton Fine Acrylic Colours (shown below):

If you want to produce an artistic texture, use a sponge to apply the paint instead of a brush. But this is really up to you. 

That's it! Easy! Enjoy decoupaging your iphone jacket/sleeve!!