Use steel wool to rough up a plast case leaving a design shiny.

I have a camera case that had a pretty glossy finish. That's not really my style, so I wanted to roughen it up a bit(or pre-age it). I think some sort of sandblaster would have worked well to do this, but I didn't really try to get a hold of one of those.

I also had the idea to mask of a portion of the plastic to keep a design in there. I am in no way good at freeform drawing, so I went with the old standby(and somewhat clichéd) images of 80s video game characters. I had no clue how it would turn out, so this is very much an experiment in the actual probject, as well as the instructable(this is my first try at one)

Step 1: Prepare Tools and Ingredients

I started by getting all the parts I thought I would need together on my workspace (which doubles as a dining room table). I guessed pretty well at the beginning, and the only tool I needed extra was a vacuum to clean up the mess of plastic and steel wool I'd made.

Step 2: Cut Out the Images From the Sticker Paper.

I neglected to get a good picture of this step(oops). So, I'll combine it with the next (pretty easy) step which is to place them on the plastic.

Since I picked very pixelated images, it turned out to be pretty easy to cut them out. I didn't need much pressure on the knife to make it happen since the sticker was kinda like heavy cardstock.

Step 3: Scratch!

It's time to get out the steel wool and start scratching away at the plastic. I mostly just used the steel wool in straight lines perpendicular to the edge of the sticker. I thought this method had the best chance of not accidently annihilating the sticker.

The stickers themselves held out pretty well. The ink on top of them scratched away, but that's find by me.

Step 4: Get Rid of Those Stickers

I pulled the stickers off, and cleaned away the bits of grime they left behind. I think it looks ok. It would have been better with a more uniform matte finish, but I wasn't really quite sure how to achieve that. It now kinda looks like someone removed the picture they've had on their wall for the last 20 years.

I'd love to know if anyone has any better ways to achieve a similar look.