Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Valentine Postcards (Tutorial)

I made some valentines from a sheet of thickish clear styrene, and it was harder than I thought it would be. I used spraypaint, and x-acto knife, scissors, deco tape, and a fine tipped sharpie. 
The styrene has a layer of plastic protecting it, so I cut away the parts I wanted to spray paint white. This was the hard step. The part with plastic on will stay clear, and the part without will be white. My design had a lot of tiny scallops and the plastic film was clingy but not adhesive, and couldn't see the tiny clear pieces. 

Then I spray painted the styrene with two coats of white spray paint. This picture was between coats. 

When I peeled off the plastic, the cards looked great. They were impossible to cut apart with the x-acto (it only scored the styrene), so I used scissors, which was kind of hard since I didn't want to snap the plastic by bending it too far. 
I was going to do a second layer of spray paint, in red, but the cans were in a cage at blick and no one opened it for me when I lurked near it for a while. So, I put lacy red deco tape from daiso on them, as an accent. 
 
I addressed them on the non spray painted side, and wrote little love notes on the back of the stamps since they'll show through. 
 Here is a finished front.


 One of them is going to Italy, and I am a little worried about that one holding up, but my flexing and scratching tests made me think these will still look great after their trip through the mail.

2 comments:

Robert van de Walle said...

Very cool! I've not seen transparent mail items before. Hmmm... bound to make a stir!

Caitlan said...

:) I heard the one sent to VT and the one sent to a stranger in Italy made it alright, but I haven't heard about the two sent within CA.