For my most recent art project, I painted my locker, and two of Shannon's, to look like the TARDIS. The TARDIS is the time machine and spaceship from the television series Doctor Who, which I'm a tiny bit obsessed with.

I ran into several problems while creating this project, but, despite this, the finished product made me very happy. Originally, I had wanted to start my locker about three weeks sooner than I actually got to. I had to delay, due to a lack of blue paint in the school. Seeing as almost the entire TARDIS is some shade of blue, it wouldn't really work to paint it without blue paint.

A second problem I encountered was painting edges. I have shaky hands, so keeping lines straight and clean can be difficult and very time-consuming for me. I managed to overcome this problem by taping the borders where colours met. However, this lead to a new problem. If the tape stayed on the locker for extended periods of time, the paint underneath would peel away with it. Again, I managed to overcome this problem. I learned that if I kept the tape on my locker for two days at maximum, the paint wouldn't peel away when I removed it.

Another problem, though very minor, was trying to decide how many lockers my design would take up. Three lockers was slightly too wide for a proper scale, but two lockers was much too narrow. I ended up adapting the design a tiny bit in order to make it fit across three lockers.

The process of painting the locker was a bit lengthy. I first had to prime the locker, which left it in a nasty-looking shade of grey. It stayed this colour for much longer than I would have liked, due to the no-blue-paint issue. After I got the locker primed, I went on to sketch out the design. This involved a lot of measuring, in order to get proportions as close as possible, and to get the design to be symmetrical. When the design was sketched out, painting could commence. I taped the borders, so that the paint would only go where I wanted it. Each part of the locker required multiple layers of paint. Anywhere that was white took two layers. Blue areas took three; a light layer, a medium-toned layer, and a dark layer on top. Because I painted the layers on with a sponge, you could see some of the lighter layers through the darker surface layers. This was done in order to recreate the 'wooden' texture of the TARDIS.

Overall, I'm insanely happy with my locker. It's incredibly satisfying to be able to go to it every day and feel a bit of pride at what I accomplished. Not too many people in the world can say that they have their own TARDIS.

No Copyright infringement intended.

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Here's a close-up of the sign on the front door.