Painting inspires chair

Back in the day when I was a graphic designer fulltime, I used to get a few different industry mags in subscription. They would usually feature one or two noteworthy folk in the feild, and provide oodles of inspiration. A lot of the images they featured were beautiful, and I would cut them out for later thought. One so artist whose work I found delightful was Lyn Bishop, who did several pieces of work devoted to her travels in Asia. This particular painting, titled Red Wall With Ferns, I found very pleasing to the eye, and was determined to do something with it at a later date.

Well, I finally found the perfect thing! This sad and lonely little chair was sitting by the road to my house with a FREE sign attached to it, and we all know I cannot pass up free junk. It took a lot of elbow grease to clean it up, obviously it had been sitting in someone's garage for a millenia.

So, I started by obviously cleaning and sanding, and filling in the gigantic crack along the middle of the seat with wood putty. I then painted it a thick coat of gloss red, which I didn't really care for, so I repainted in black. SInce I only put one layer of the black on, it ended up with an insanely cool semi-crackled effect in places, with the red peaking through. I scanned and printed the fan part of the painting and decoupaged it onto the top. I then ran down the street and picked up several Korean newspapers and painstakingly cut out the fern leaves from them (I realize that the paitning is from a trip to China, but I don't live in a Chinese neighborhood, so I made do). Since the print was quite bright, I sponged on a layer of wood stain to soften in a bit. Then I found the more colourful print ads and cut out the little flowers. I used the leftover red paint to hand-paint the stamen detail. I then found her original image of the Chinese script in the painting, which apparently was the character for 'spirit', and made a stencil out of it. I used a bit of chrome paint for that, to give it a little oomf. And voila! I am beside myself with glee at how well this whole thing turned out. Tres Chic!