After buying my first cars, I noticed that the plastic blister packaging from my Hot Wheels & Matchbox purchases could look like a stack of crates or containers if I put a “tarp” over them. It was super easy, basically free, and only took a couple hours even with drying time. I love how they turned out, and much better than throwing them away!

Summary

Time: 1-2 hours including drying time

Cost: $5-10 if you have no materials. You probably already have the materials.

Difficulty: Easy, 1/5

Materials

• Plastic blister pack OR Anything else
• Coffee filters OR baby wipes OR paper towels
• PVA, Craft, Wood, or Elmer’s glue
• Acrylic paints

Directions

Trim the blister pack

The first thing I did was clean up and cut off the excess plastic where the blister pack attaches to the cardboard. This isn’t completely necessary, but as I chose not to base them, I didn’t want any plastic peeking out.

Prep the tarp

Take your coffee filters, baby wipes or paper towels and give them a good roughing up. Crumple and un-crumple them a few times to get a bunch of different little creases. Since I was using coffee filters, I also took this time to trim the edges to make them rectangular. This probably doesn’t matter too much but I wanted them to fall like a normal rectangular tarp would.

Make the glue mixture

Mix up some of your glue with water. I did maybe a 1:8 or 1:10 mixture of glue to water, but I just eyeballed it. My mixture had the consistency of water, with some of the opacity of the glue.

Dip the tarp

Take your crumpled tarp material and dip it into your glue mixture. Wipe off the excess with your fingers (If you’ve ever made Papier-mâché, this should feel familiar). Things are going to be a bit sticky from here on out, so get used to it!

Drape the tarp

It’s time to get creative! Place the wet “tarp” on the “crates” and get some folds and creases going! This is going to be a “figure it out as you go” technique, play around with the tarp, make it messy or neat! Don’t worry about it too much and have fun – if you don’t like the end result after it’s dried, you can always dip it back in the glue mixture and give it another go!

More tips for sculpting folds:

Fold up a bunch at the bottom, and push down on that – it will give some tension to the drape from the top down like gravity would.

Folds are just areas that aren’t clinging to the blister pack. If you want to make more folds, just pinch a little bit and pull it away from the surface, then let go. The extra slack will turn into folds.

On some of the short sides I folded them over like you would with wrapping paper to get them nice and tight – If you wanted to keep something dry under there you would probably do this. On some sides I left them loose, like they’d been out for a while and the wind blew away the “tight” edges.

Leave them alone to dry

They’re going to need some time to dry. I put a gentle box fan a few feet away from mine to help speed up the process. Don’t mess with them while they’re drying! It will cause the drying tarp to stop clinging to the blister pack and you’ll lose some of those hard-earned folds!

Paint them!

Base Coat

A solid color of any ol’ acrylic paint will work. Do your base coat quickly and don’t go back over spots until it dries if possible, the moisture in acrylic paint is going to soften up your tarp again and you could lose definition of your folds if you muck about too much. Once the base coat dries it seals it up again so feel free to go back over it multiple times after the base cost dries. If you’re airbrushing, don’t worry about it!

Wash/Shade

I used a black wash, a brown would work fine as well. If you’ve washed before, you know how to wash. Same principle, nothing special here. If you’ve never washed before, here’s a 4-minute introduction. Basically: Apply the wash liberally, especially around folds; Don’t go back over it until it’s dried completely.

Highlight/Dry Brush

This is the most important step in turning these from drab boxes into stunning tarps! I mixed my base coat of paint in with just a dab of white to lighten it up, then dry brushed around the edges and folds. I also went really-dry around the whole thing, which will accent those little crumples we made at the beginning. Lastly, I did a really-dry really-quick run of plain white around the major edges. Here’s a quick intro to dry brushing.

Weather

I just took a couple of different brown paints and “stippled” them on in different areas. This part is completely up to you, maybe your tarps have been inside a warehouse and aren’t all dirty!

You’re done!

From here, you could base these if you want, maybe add some details stacked on top of them, or use the same technique on an old car or other piece of equipment.