Above, my Farm Chair in the "During" Stage
I have always wanted to try my hand at painting a piece of furniture... and in my head, I thought I knew kinda-sorta what would be involved. So, when I was asked last fall (2022) to paint a child's wooden chair for our church's Vacation Bible School auction, I didn't hestitate to say "Absolutely!... I would love to!" The auction isn't until this coming spring (2023), so I knew I had lots of time to figure out how to go about painting the chair. Plus, it was for a great cause!... The VBS kids planned to raise money to pay for cochlear implants for children in the Dominican Republic who are deaf. I was so confident that this would be easy-peasy that I volunteered to paint THREE chairs of varying sizes. Yup!... I was sure I totally "got this!"
So, I put on my researcher's hat and started Googling furniture painting. Armed with my new found knowledge, I headed to our local Home Depot and purchased sample sized latex paint in a rainbow of colors. I set to work priming the little chair (which took a whole lot longer than I'd thought it would!). Next up... sketch out my farm design on the primed surface and start adding color.
Well, that was my first big mistake!... It turned out that I had not been thinking about all the white background around my farm characters that needed to be painted in with white latex paint. It was an unnecessarily tedious job that could have been a whole lot easier if I'd just given the whole chair two good coats of latex paint before I started sketching. *sigh!* First lesson learned!
After painting all my little characters (multiple coats of paint on each!), I outlined them all with my water based Sharpie paint pen. That was my second big mistake, because when I started to spray the chair with my acrylic sealant (Polycrylic), my nice crisp black outline started to run and smear! YIKES!! Apparently I should have used an oil based paint marker instead!
Needless to say, I ended up having to repaint the whole "MOO" and part of a flower on the top of the chair. Thankfully, though, I found that my Krylon spray did not smear the outline, so I gave the design a good coat of Krylon and then added the Polycrylic on top of that to make it more scuff resistant.
You might have guessed by now that I ended up painting just ONE chair for the auction. By the time I'd finished the farm chair, I was DONE, DONE, DONE with chair painting! I will say though that the chair came out pretty darn cute in real life... my photos really don't do it justice!
Will I paint another chair in the future?... well, I might someday in the very distant future for a very good cause. I sure have learned a lot this time around about what NOT to do!... and maybe the next time (if there ever is a next time!) I'll know a whole lot better about what I'm doing! *wink!*
