Up until last week, I'd been gallivanting around town for months with an old, chipped gold case on my cell phone that looked like it had endured one too many hard nights on the wrong end of Sunset Strip. As each day went by, another gold chip would flake, and at one point, I honestly considered just chipping the rest of the gold off, giving it a good scrub down and keeping it as an all-white case....until the case itself began to crack.
It's funny how things align, because the next week I was invited to join The Makeful Challenge by Makeful, a creative community for makers, where they send members a particular material in which to give your personal creative spin. Then the community votes on their favorites. This challenge, of all projects, is a cell phone case! I got right to work on my case design (because I genuinely really needed a phone case) and decided to go with a refreshing blue watercolor design for summer. The project took about five minutes between painting the stripes and cutting out the template, and now I've happily said good riddance to my chipped and cracked out old case.
If you're also ready for a new phone case, why not make one? The beauty of the paper insert is if next week you realize you hate stripes and actually love purple narwhals, you can switch out the design in 5 minutes flat (assuming you can draw narwhals, of course!)
Materials:
- Clear cell phone case
- Medium-weight white paper (thicker than copy paper)
- Watercolor paint
- Water brush
- Scissors
- Artist's knife
- Pencil
1. Fill the body of the water brush with water. Then squeeze a bit of the brush's water into the paint palette as you activate the paint and load it onto the brush. Paint horizontal lines of color across the paper, loading the brush with more paint as the color becomes faint.
2. Next trace the outline of your phone onto the striped paper and cut it out.
3. Try sliding the template into the phone case and take note of trimming adjustments needed.. Likely you'll need to cut it down by 1/16″ on all sides to fit properly. Once you've got a good fit (paper laying flat in the case), trace the camera opening in the case, and use an artist's knife to remove this portion. Place the template back in the case, and snap your phone into place!
