Sallyacious

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June 03, 2008

Project the Next

After I got done with my button box, I was so proud of myself and so interested in doing some more playing that I decided to finally finish the box that holds my greeting cards.

I'm a sucker for blank greeting cards with fancy art on the front. I have BUNCHES that I occasionally take the time to write in and send off to various friends. And for years, literally, they have been quietly sitting in a white cardboard suitcase on a shelf in my closet. I've been meaning to decorate it since, I think, the fall of 2005.

Here's what it looked like two days ago.

Originally, it had a stupid rooster/country/Americana design on it. (You can sort of see it through the paint on the lid of the above photo.) I actually bought three in three different sizes when they went on sale and immediately painted them white. One went to my friend Maaike as a birthday present. She came over one day and picked out the suitcase she wanted and then dove into my thousands of image files and reams of fancy papers to decorate her box. Which I believe she now stores her camera in. The other two I decided to use for my own personal storage, but I never got around to decorating them. Though I did discover that I'd used art deco paper on the inside upper lid of the larger box, the one I'm playing with now.

I knew I wanted it to look well-traveled and cool, and yet the design also needed to refer--I felt--to the contents somehow. So the first thing I did was practically give myself carpal tunnel by using the packing tape transfer method on ten art deco and french poster postcards. I'm not going to explain how to do that. There are plenty of other places online where you can find that information. I will say that they didn't get really clear until I used a small sponge on them. My fingers were not cutting it as paper backing removers.

(You can see the transfers drying on the table. This was before I used the sponge on them. Note the distinct lack of transparency.)

I used spray adhesive to attach the semi-transparent stickers to the still white suitcase and thought about what I wanted to do with it next for about 36 hours.

Last night, I mixed up black, white, silver & copper acrylic paints to get a nice charcoal color and painted around the stickers. I am really bad at this. It looked atrocious. Fortunately, the paint peeled right off the packing tape (good thing to know), and once I'd lightly sanded the whole thing with entirely the wrong grit of sandpaper (too heavy, would have used something finer if I'd known what I was doing), it actually started to look pretty cool.

(These are post-sanding and picking at the paint on the stickers. I think you can probably tell, though.)

Once that was done, I mixed a satin finish clear archival sealer with copper and silver acrylic paint and covered the whole thing again. It's currently drying. (Note the attractive patented drying system for when you've painted the entire object and can't set it down anywhere.)

My next step (if all things go according to plan) is to sparingly apply some pewter metallic wax, and maybe some black paint or charcoal, to age it up a bit and then I will give it at least two coats of plain sealer and call it good. Unless I get a different/better idea in the meantime.

Posted by sally at June 3, 2008 01:21 PM

Comments

Posted by: Heather K at June 3, 2008 08:39 PM

Posted by: OohLaLaura at June 6, 2008 06:24 AM

Posted by: inlandempiregirl at June 7, 2008 08:06 AM

Posted by: Sallyacious at June 7, 2008 10:47 PM

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