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Recently I had my yellow Gameboy front signed by the entirety of Enter Shikari and I'd like to protect the signatures and am unsure whether to use a clear spray coat or something else?
They used Gold and Silver permanent Sharpie pens (will try and edit in a pic later). What would you guys suggest to help increase the lifespan of these signatures? I'd like to use it as a gigging Gameboy eventually.
ahh it's cool that they did that! i'd probably just swap the shell with another gameboy and display it somewhere tbh
I've heard many clear coats cause the sharpie to run/bleed because it contains various solvents/alcohol? 
Get a new gameboy, swap the shells, or just retire the signed one.
Last edited by ForaBrokenEarth (Jan 30, 2015 10:18 pm)
I have a case by Kool Skull. The bottom layer is sum white paint and on that he used black Sharpies to drawn on.
He also put a clear coat on - Ecspecially on the sides this lead to the effect of the black ink getting a purple washed out tone.
I ended up redrawing alot of the lines to fix that and put coat on it again. The pencils i use are not sharpies and i use them also to make my Custom Snapback Caps (example), the clear (non-shiny) coat on them is also the one i used on the Case.
So basiclly it also depends not only on the coat - The quality of the marker ink also counts.
Overall, either go with the "Swap-Case" Method or take the risk.
I don't know about silver or gold sharpie, but clear coating sharpie can go very wrong.
I've heard you can get away with it by doing extremely fine coats and working up to thicker coats, but can't vouch for this.
I can confirm this works but it requires a lot of finesse. Obviously, ensure the sharpie is totally dry and make sure your first 3-4 'coats' of clear coat are very, very light and dry sufficiently between layers.
I haven't used the gold and silver before, but regular sharpie will bleed under most clear spray paints. You can buy a fixative from art shops (usually labelled as fixative) but it's basically hairspray. I would do a test with the sharpies on something else first if it's something you want to preserve.
Best of luck.
If you want to test it, you could always use the inside of a gameboy to do it, or even the inside of the battery door. That way you don't have to mess up an entire gameboy just to test something that may or may not work.