Let me give you some painting tips that will help you achieve amazing!
The single most important thing to consider, when painting cardboard, is not to make it too wet! Wetness is the biggest enemy of crisp cardboard.
Did you ever see cardboard boxes left out in the rain? They are totally ruined. They fall apart and.... the layers of cardboard are not glued together with glue! They are adhered together with starch! Yup, starch! It is quite good for cardboard and it is the reason why cardboard is so easily recycled. If boxes were glued they would be very difficult to recycle.
Anyway, this starch dissolves in water. So, when painting your cardboard projects do it in a way that is not too wet!
Tip 1: Try to keep it dry! Don't brush on the paint too wet. Paint with as little water as possible. Not only will the corrugations show but the cardboard itself will curl and the edges may curl like in this next picture.
Warpage happens because the paper, once over-wetted will shrink. You can minimize this and even negate it totally by painting both sides of the cardboard. The shrinkage happens evenly on front and back thus canceling out. The cardboard will remain flat.
Tip 2: The direction that you brush on the paint makes a difference. Take a look at this next picture. It shows brushing in two different direction, across the corrugations (left side) and with the corrugations (right side). And you can see this makes a difference.
Brushing in the same direction as the corrugations usually looks better. The corrugations show up more if you brush across them.
Using Masking Tape (Or other tapes) on your cardboard projects is terrific. I love using masking tape. But it will affect how it looks when painted. The tape takes paint differently than cardboard. The second picture shows this difference.
If you want to get an absolute minimum of painted seams you can use the cardboard itself as a masking tape. Cut and peel off strips of the top layer of cardboard.
And glue it onto seams as if it were masking tape.
When it is painted the seam is much less noticeable because you are painting cardboard and cardboard not cardboard and masking tape.
Getting the Colors to pop!
I ran a test so you can see some of the options you have when painting cardboard. The goal of this test is to see how which way gets bright colors that pop!
On this piece of cardboard I painted a first layer then let it dry. From left to right, as you can see in the picture is mod podge matte, plain white acrylic paint, and a coat of orange paint.
I let that test board dry. Then I painted an even layer of orange paint over each square. This is how it turned out.
The base coat of mod podge on the left sealed the cardboard nicely. But, it definitely is a bit dull. The base coat of orange paint on the right is pretty good, and a bit brighter after the second coat.
Sealing the cardboard to keep it fresh and bright.
A final, optional stage, is to seal the cardboard with some kind of a sealant. Mod podge works well for this. Use a matte mod podge to keep it about the same and use a gloss mod podge if you want some shine to it.
There are also spray on sealants that you can use. I like them a lot. Now that you had already applied two coats of paint to the cardboard and let it dry the cardboard will be resilient to warping and wrinkling.
And you don't actually have to paint directly on the cardboard. For my carnival shoot game I painted and drew out various decorations and then glued those decorations to the skeeball project. You can see that project here
Draw and Paint strips and shapes on posterboard.
Then cut the pieces out, in this case strips, and glue them to the project.
 I have one more important tip for you when it comes to painting cardboard. Don't overlook this one. You need to know it before you start building your project.
Right here
|
