Man Cave Camo Chairs

Last spring I bought a couple of dilapidated director's chairs for $5.  My plan was to paint one a Caribbean Blue and the other a bright pink
and recover them in white.  I figured they would be fun, but my husband fell in love with them just like they were.  Let's face it, these were disgusting!  The canvas was gross, the wood was split in spots, and moldy in places, but he thought they were comfortable and would be great in the shop.  Well his birthday was coming up, and he has been great about letting me take over the shop when I'm working on a project, and has taught me so much about revamping furniture, I knew I had to do something special for him.  So I figured I could paint them up to look like some of his camo rain gear.  I mean how hard could it be?  There is a popular camo print that is mostly twigs and leaves.  I figured I could draw some sticks and a few leaves.  HA! I can't even draw a stick.  I tried on a practice board and failed miserably.  So back to the drawing board, or in this case YouTube .  I found a video of a guy painting a boat for duck hunting that used spray paint and some leaves and ferns as a kind of stencil.  So off I went gathering twigs, tree branches, leaves, ferns, weeds & pine cones.  This is a pretty good sampling of what I used.
First my hubby re-glued the split pieces (not knowing they were for him), then I primed them and painted a base coat with Krylon Fossil.  Then while he was at work I started on the first chair.  I just used whatever paint I had laying around.  I would hold a branch, piece of fern or a stick over the wood and spray some brown or green paint.  I used some cinnamon brown paint on a tiny pine cone and rolled it on.  The little ferny weeds I dipped in the ebony stain and carefully pressed on.  I dipped the bull pine needles in some white paint and just ran them across.  When it seemed to bright, I took some "Mid-morning Latte" paint that I used on my living room and washed over it.  All in all, not counting the primer or base coat, it took me about 3 1/2 hours per chair to camo.  I ended up doing them about a month apart (there was a vacation in between), so they didn't turn out exactly alike.

They also needed new seats and backs, like I said the canvas was gross.  They were easy enough to sew up, using the old ones for patterns.  Then I added a little embellishment of an elk head using the freezer paper iron on method.  The first transfer went great, but like I said it was a while before I got to the second one, and all I can figure is that I switched out ink cartridges in my printer, and the new one just didn't want to play.

Oh well, my husband loves them and has been showing them off to everyone so I guess they were a success.