Paint your own Mexico-inspired wooden seats with designs found in Mexican art, home textiles and goods. Mexican color schemes vary greatly from color-washed light tones to main colours and deep colours. Pick a color scheme for your layout which suits the room in which the seats will be used.
Serape Style
Look to serapes or Mexican handwoven blankets and table runners as inspiration for colorful striped chairs. Choose 4 or more colours suited to the room space, including either white or black for thin color bands. Paint the seats a base color — whichever color you would like to see the most on every seat. Once the paint dries, use painter’s tape implemented in several straight vertical or horizontal lines of varying widths to create borders for every band of color as you paint. Plot a repeating pattern should you wish the colours to duplicate in a particular sequence, or even a mirror-image design featuring blue on the exterior, green next, and so on, depending upon your intended layout. For the simplest styling, then copy the basic colours from an image of a real serape which you enjoy.
Day of the Dead
Day of the Dead, or Dia de Muertos, mixes beautiful floral designs with skulls and skeletons in a distinctive style. Paint the whole seat a vivid color like green, red or yellow, then paint a huge skull contour on the chair. Paint bold flowers all around the skull contour, using images of Day of the Dead designs to motivate your work till you get the hang of it. In some instances, these themed designs look somewhat psychedelic, with the abundance of blooms in graphic cartoon-style illustrations. Add smaller or flowers decorated skulls throughout your layout.
Ancient Inspirations
Ancient cultures indigenous to Mexico created a wealth of art in the forms of pottery, ceremonial objects and stone carvings; many such items still exist today. Use the art of the Olmecs or Mayans to create chairs inspired by artifacts displayed in museums or in pictorial form in novels. Print bold figures like warriors or birds and copy them onto your furniture. Give the seats an artifact-style finish by adding a yellow or brown glaze on the top once you’ve completed the art, sanding off the paint in some areas to make the furniture look older.
Cozy Kitchen-Tile Traditions
Paint the seats in designs reminiscent of Mexican tiles found in kitchens and throughout Mexican abodes. Blues, yellows, greens and oranges dominate the shingles. Many of the tile designs feature flowers or plants. Trace a tile layout onto contact paper to create your own stencil, or on a piece of artwork or foam foam to create a stamp for a single-colored layout. Paint a big tile-style design freehand on the seat or seat back, then add smaller versions or tiny flowers and doodles across the remainder of the seat by means of a color pulled from the tile.