Meet my six brand-new artist brush boxes that I hand painted with animal motifs, using acrylic colors. Used to store pencils and brushes (or gummy bears, for that matter), the boxes are 28 cm long, 14 cm wide, and 4.5 cm high, and come in unique designs. Check out the images below for close-up views.

Here’s how they were made:

1. I treated myself with six bamboo artist brush boxes (that was the easy part).
2. Unfortunately, the flexible lid had the engraved silhouette image of a bamboo tree on it, which sucked. It required a great amount of beveling to get rid of it. In aiming to get the paint to adhere to the surfaces, I used sand paper on all sides.
3. I subsequently applied molding paste to cover up some of the crevices on the lid, and coated all sides using white acrylic primer – I needed to do this three times (ugh).
4. THEN came the color, at last. I used a variety of acrylic colors for the various undercoats before painting the animals on all sides.
5. After drying up, I used sandpaper to abrade, however loosely, some of the spots where I felt too much paint was applied. This process also introduced slightly grungy streaks to the surface, which helped attain that vintage look, turning the designs lively and animated.
6. The last step was to apply matte varnish on all sides for permanent protection.

Baseline is, I had a great deal of fun working on this, as I’m sure you can see ;-)

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And these are the top lids for all six boxes:

Box 1 - Crocodile, giraffes, bear, fish, white tiger
Box 2 - Frog, llama, dog, cat, giraffes

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Box 3 - White elephant, birds, giraffes
Box 4 - Elephants, cat, giraffe, snake

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Box 5 - Cat, elephant, frog, duck, squid
Box 6 - Whale, bear, monkey, birds, crocodile

Here’s an intricate collage-style illustration on the history of art. This was for an art book. I liked the idea of taking a different approach to other art encyclopedias, and decided to have some fun. I went ahead and designed a cinema interior, and placed cutouts from famous paintings, mosaics, and vases betweens the seats in such a way so as to suggest a real audience. You’ll recognize the film being shown, I’m sure ;-)

Note how the clippings in the styles of Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, and Piet Mondrian are not taken from these pop artists’ actual works, but instead I created them myself by mimicking their respective drawing styles.