Give old dining chairs a new lease on life with a unique paint treatment.
Painting furniture is a terrific tactic for turning old or unsightly dining chairs into fun focal points or elegant seating for guests. While you can go the usual route and paint your chairs solid colors, or distress them for a shabby chic look, consider a painting treatment that's a little more unusual to give your chairs artistic, one-of-kind appeal.
Pull Out the Paint Pens
After covering your chairs with a few coats of shiny new paint, embellish them with paint pens. Paint pens give you excellent control and allow you to draw pictures, write words or add detailed embellishments such as dots or swirls. Consider scribbling lines of a romantic poem on each chair, drawing a large monogram on the back of each chair, painting on polka dots or writing each family member's name across a chair so everyone has their very own spot at the dinner table. Your options are as unlimited as your imagination.
Stripe it Rich
Use blue painter's tape to create stripes on your chairs. Don't go for boring, go for broke with chevron stripes, random widths, multiple colors or soft pastels. Try vertical stripes on the seats and horizontal stripes on the chairs' backs, or a monochromatic look with multiple shades of the same color.
Tone on Tone
Make a subtle statement with a tone-on-tone treatment. Purchase the same color in both matte and gloss formulas. Choose one for the base, then use the other to stencil or free-hand any sort of designs you like, from a brocade pattern to fleur de lis, words or swirls. The result is a subtle yet noticeable design that raises solid color furniture to the next level.
Metallic
Although metal leafing is a long, tedious process, you can get similar results from metallic paints. Gold, silver, bronze and copper offer glamorous, timeless appeal. Metallic paints now come in a wider variety of colors than ever, allowing you to give your chairs a look like no other. Consider turquoise, orange or purple metallic paint to create dining chairs that are part conversation piece, part focal point, part function.
Free-Hand and Fabulous
When you free-hand chairs there are no limits. Paint flowers, animals, nature scenes or wild abstract designs. Try splatter painting your chairs in your favorite color combination, with either a very heavy or light coating of splatters. You can even let your kids cover your chairs in multicolored handprints. When you're finished painting your chairs, embellish them with decoupage, decals, jewels or mosaic tiles.
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