Distress stain, paint & marker holder

This is the advance warning of a step by step coming up over the next few days.

You'll need
1 ready made box 10 * 14 * 3.5"  I bought mine at Homesense.  If you want to make your own box that'll be fine but you might have to adjust the sizes and layout of the cubby holes to suit.
2 a3 sheets of mountboard
14 a4 sheets of boxmaking weight cardstock.  I used Annamaries.
Brown gummed tape, tombow (or other strong quick drying glue) and strong dst
hougie,
score tool
bone folder
handles for drawers

This is how the box will look once you've finished the initial construction

Doesnt look good with the white boxes showing against the inside.

I would highly recommend you get in a good supply of gesso and a 1" brush ready to decorate.










This is my first bodge job..

I came across a couple of issues decorating that I should have thought of... Not all of the surfaces were going to react to the paint in the same way.. the gesso on the drawers took the docrafts metallic black paint fine, the cubby holes are only 300gsm card and if you add too much paint they start to cockle & warp... paint in a checkerboard fashion, let dry for a few hours then paint the rest.

I also found that drawers that were quite smooth when first made started to become very stiff once the gesso & paint had dried.   I'm going to try turtle wax on them tomorrow to see if that helps (it's supposed to stop acrylic painted surfaces sticking together) if not I'll amend the sizes for the drawers down by about 2mm when I write up the how to..  But the worst disaster was the drop down front...  I'd originally wanted the red to show through thin layers of metallic black and adding lots of guilding waxes to create an oriental feel.  All was working great until I touched the dry paint with a damp thumb.. off came the paint.. right back to the original red design.  Not even a hint of colour staining. Change of plans.. I sprayed it all with various cosmic shimmer mists hoping that the biner would help.. didnt like the colours as the ones I really wanted to use were bunged up lol..  Plan c time lol  alchi inked (stream, raspberry, melon & pearl) over the drawer unit and lid, straight over the dried mists.  If I'm honest I'm really liking the way it looks irl but the ink is only sitting on the paint and although it now seems waterproof it's not scratch proof... hence the couple on pink scratches you can see.  I'm going to call it quits on the rest of the decorating until I have some black gesso then I'll redo the lid and not even attempt to do anything with the outside of the box (poppy paper) until it's been well gessoed.