The Womble Drawers of Awesomeness

Right, this is a bit of a labour of love, me and craft, well, I love it, but I'm not very good at it exactly, so this is me making stuff up as I go a long.

I have this unit that my TV is on, it's pine and sturdy but boring! I was going to paint it and for a bit of a shabby chic look, seems like a lot of work though, especially when I am fairly well known for my ability to screw things up, somehow hurt myself, or cover me or the cat with paint. For this reason it hasn't been done.

So I was going to post a before photo but it failed
and now it's half done, so here's a picture of my cat Riley!

I had what I believe to be the idea of the century, which is that rather than painting it I could decoupage it.

On a side note, I have rather a habit of trying to attempt to be an adult, doing all this "posh" well done, organised and elegant stuff. I think I have realised finally that that's not me! I'm not that! So anyways, back to the subject.
The decoupage! I had this cool idea of doing it with comic books, just the draw fronts (yeah, coz doing the whole thing would be completely crazy - obviously).
Therefore I needed to get some comics to do this with,  it actually turns out that it's difficult to buy broken or damaged comic books in the UK. Therefore I popped into my local Forbidden Planet to get some grab bags.

Ouch, 25p per comic for a grab bag, that's a mite expensive.... also, I kind of have a constitutional objection to actually taking comic books apart since that's like taking books apart, or damaging them, or that sort of thing. It's against everything I was brought up to believe!

You can cut stuff out with scissors or a scalpel

However, the lovely man working in my local Forbidden Planet went to take a little look out the back for me to see if he had any damaged stock. For some unfathomable reason head office had decided to take a few off sale or something so he had a load of comic books with no front covers (they have to make them incapable of being sold) which would have just gone in the bin! He gave me a pile of about 15 comic books! they're all copies of the same 3 but WOOT! Best part was they were FREE!

I kind of wallpapered the draw with half pages,
the key is to cover the whole of the drawer front

I've googled decoupage, bought some PVA, made a mix of that and water (about 50/50) in a little bottle, cut out a load of cool bits.
The internet says to do all the boring stuff like sand the drawers and clean them and all that sensible stuff.
However, that's not really me... therefore I put some newspaper down and just kinda went for it.

I then added my "feature" bits
to get a vague idea of positioning

I worked with a load of half pages to completely cover the front, painting the mixture on the draw front and the back of the image, then painting the top of the image, before sponging it with a damp kitchen sponge to remove the excess. Then I left it to dry (you're meant to leave it a few hours but in typical me fashion I left it only 1 hour) before getting the smaller motif images and pasting them on top. Doing the same thing as before, I painted it all down before sponging and leaving to dry again.

I painted the knobs with a mixture of
PVA and acrylic paint for a
satin finish

Then I coated it again and again in this pasty mixture as I have no varnish. about 4 coats should be enough to protect it and act as a glaze until I manage to find something else. Then I cut the hole for the draw pull (with a a screw) and added the newly painted handles (painted with acrylic mixed with PVA).

Or at least, I will, as I continue to do each draw one at a time, I've only done the one so far.

This is pure awesomeness!