Art card storage

I love making ATC-sized bits of art — both Copic colouring and using mixed media techniques — but I have been struggling with storing them sensibly. Some were propped up on a shelf, others were just in a pile, and I was in danger of losing track of them.

I do have a pack of MDF art shrines waiting to be decorated and eventually I’ll use those to display some of the cards. But that still left the problem of what to do with them right now. Handily, That’s Crafty also make an MDF ATC storage box, so I picked one up and put it together. (And this is where I pretend that a couple of months didn’t pass before I got around to painting it…)

I didn’t really have much of an idea of how I wanted to decorate it, but it needed doing, so I decided to keep it simple. I started off with a coat of gesso to seal the MDF and then added the teal base coat of acrylic paint. I did stamp some leaves around the outside, but I wasn’t happy with the effect, so they’re mostly covered up (you can still see them from some angles). The texture was created with a piece of natural sponge: just a single slightly darker colour on the inside and several layers of colour on the outside. When that was all dry, I carefully painted the gold edges and added some gold texture on the outside as well.

Natural sponge is really useful for adding texture without creating a repeating pattern. Just don’t get too much paint on the sponge (or you get blobs rather than speckling) and then build up layers of different colours until you are happy with the effect.