Repurposing a Cross Pen Case
(most pix below may be clicked for a larger version of the image)

I have recently (finally) started to get back into sketching, watercolor, etc. Inspired by some great examples I decided to attempt to consolidate all of the accessories required to be ready to sketch something at a moment's notice. This exercise serves the dual purpose of being organized and temporarily avoiding actually sketching something. Basically, I am planning for the fact that I am a klutz and will drop, lose or break sketching accessories unless they are kept simple.  Many thanks to everyone at SketchCrawl for the inspiration.

I discovered this stereotypical cross pen and pencil case, a mid-eighties high school graduation gift in a drawer. It struck me that it is the perfect size to hold all of the items I want with me for a sketch!

It was surprisingly hard to cut, peel, scrape and dissolve the quality pleather covering!

Here is a quick rundown of what I did:
I removed the covering of the case to reveal the aluminum skeleton (see below). This required an x-acto knife, pliers, goof-off and swearing. Next I molded 14 half-pan sized trays using super sculpey in the lower-left area of the bottom of the case. To do this I took a mold of an empty tray in my old travel set with sculpey then baked it to make a pan-shaped stamp. I baked the case with the sculpey in it which revealed that there was a small scrap of pleather left in the hinge area - this filled my house with a terrible smelly smoke. After I recovered from the gasses I discovered that additional sculpting was necessary to widen and clean up the shape of the the 'pans'. I used a foredom to carve the trays a bit bigger.

Next I painted the inside with white enamel paint and the outside with black enamel. I applied 3 coats of each, one per day and just let the project become a 5 minute a day for a few weeks venture. After the paint was totally dry I covered the outside with 3 coats of polyurethane to minimize scratching. It was at this point that I remembered I had this gold foil stuff left over from the nineties (pictured at bottom). Basically you print something with a laser printer, tape the foil over the printed area then run it through the printer a second time. The gold foil transfers only where the toner laid before. It rocks. The box says to store below 85 degrees Fahrenheit. It was stashed in my Arizona garage at 120+ degrees for a decade. I am amazed it worked. I can't find it anywhere online now but still have a lot left.

I love Enrico's SketchCrawl logo and I have no need to come up with anything better so it fit the bill - I printed the logo on black origami paper 1.5 inches wide and urethane'ed it to the lid. Up close you can see the cutout of the paper around the logo but I could not be happier with the look of it!

The completed case features 14 trays for half-pans or for some dried tube watercolors, 4 beveled mixing trays and, most importantly, a spot for a Pentel Waterbrush and a pencil or two. This case and a small sketchbook are all I need carry. I recently inherited a very large set of artist's colors in tubes and will be putting them to good use here. The trays are a bit uneven but I'd imagine they will be pretty covered with paint soon so I suppose I can let the imperfections slide. It is much lighter than I imagined it would be.

Fast forward to the final product:
   

Close-ups of the gold SketchCrawl logo.
  

I conveniently have no photos of the smog filled house, the accidental super-gluing of the case to my desk or the look on my face as I choked back profanities while removing the epoxied pleather.