Thursday, February 28, 2013

Revamping my Otterbox

So, for my first tutorial, I've decided to put up my most recent accomplishment, fixing up my Otterbox. Before I started this project, I looked around everywhere on the internet and there were surprisingly few tutorials on this sort of thing. So here is mine. I transformed a camouflage Otterbox given to me by a sister into a shiny, glittery, much more adequate reflection of me. (Everyone wants their phone to reflect a little bit about them, right?) This is one of the ones with the smooth backs, mind you. I'm not sure how this would work on the more rubbery of the Otterbox cases.

The first thing I did was cover the entire back of it in a turquoise nail polish. I've found that this seems to work exceptionally well, and has so far stayed wonderfully. I had to do several coats, letting each one dry in between so that bringing the brush back across did not clump the polish. Make sure it's completely dry, and not at all soft, before you touch it. Otherwise you have a nice fingerprint in it. Light coats, while tedious, do the trick just fine. I didn't take a picture of this step since it seemed fairly self explanatory.

Step two: My incredibly talented mom cut a chevron pattern out of contact paper for me. I imagine you could use masking tape to tape it off, but contact paper was what we had. This worked lovely. I adhered it to the back of my phone. (With the actual iPhone NOT in the case at the time) Next, I painted the open areas with a black nail polish, which is shown in the picture below. Let it dry completely before adding glitter. I didn't wait long enough, and it was stuck in all sorts of places that I didn't want it to be.
Step 2- After adding the black nail polish and removing the contact paper
For my third step, I took elmers glue to the teal in between the black chevron stripes. I worked small sections at a time, brushing it on with a cheap brush and then applying a silver glitter. I also patted the glitter down into the glue a little bit to assure that it would stick. For this particular project, make sure that you only apply the glue in small quantities. You don't want it to bubble up too far off the back of your case or it will rub on everything too much. I also assume that it would increase the chances of the glitter chipping off. Mine has done well so far.

After the glitter is dried on, apply a coat or two of clear nail polish topcoat to the glitter chevron stripes. This will hold it in place and keep the glitter from flaking off as it is wont to do. I also painted a silver nail polish over the Otterbox logo at the bottom to make room for a small design. You should be able to blow off the extra glitter if it hasn't stuck to the other polish.
After adding glitter and the silver polish
At this point, there was glitter stuck to my other colors, so I simply painted right over it. I also added another coat to the turquoise/teal section as well. I put a little fox on my silver spot, because I looooove foxes. He was grabbed off a bing image search.
Ta-da! My back part is finished!
Lastly came the repainting of the inner case, since it started out hunter orange. I again removed my phone from it before I started this. (Let's not get polish on a $200 dollar phone, right?) I'm still working on putting coats of this on because my silver polish is terrible and the orange was really bright, but I basically covered every inch that sticks out when the rubber part is on with silver nail polish. When I stuck the case back together, I found that more of the orange stuck out than I originally thought, so more painting is to be done soon.

It's still a work in progress, but I'm pretty proud of the end result on the outer layer. Plenty of colors and styles could be used instead of what I did, and this method just screams for a monogram to be done. But here you go, my crafted Otterbox that is a much better show of my personality than the original camo! :-)

<3 M

P.S. This is the print of the case before, straight off the Otterbox website.


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