Celestial Chair

This is a chair that I painted for a charity auction with celestial 'star-chart' imagery. I loved this chair and bid on it myself until it went over my limit! It was bought by a very nice family though, and I can always paint another one... someday.

I found the chair itself at a garage sale and was pleased that it had a good amount of possible design surface and nice lines.

After a general cleaning and stripping, I believe I painted a base coat of black (although it could've been midnight blue.) I worked up a design based on an old star-chart. I can't take credit for the images themselves, that belongs to some ancient artist whose wondrous imagination is still evident in the beautiful line-work, but I did arrange the constellations into a cohesive circular design for the seat and chose others for the back support areas and legs.

After transferring the designs to the chair via graphite paper, I used a silver ink pen to draw the images. I then sprayed the entire chair surface with Testors transparent blue model paint. I hadn't used this stuff since building Estes rocket kits as an early teen. It was a fun trip down memory lane! After two or three coats, I went back and again hit the stars with the silver pen giving me three tones altogether - the black 'sky', the transparent blue constellations and finally the silver stars.

Please note: apparently Taurus used to be spelled with an 'h' ('Thaurus' appears on the seat.)

So although I am quite capable of idiotic typos, this isn't one of them.