I bought some small plywood chairs, and want to decorate them.

September 24, 2022 10:06 PM

I bought some small bent-plywood chairs and would like to try decorating a couple of them. I really like the look of colorful images heat-pressed onto plywood skateboards and am hoping to acheive something similar.

Because the chairs are formed from one piece of plywood, they basically have two sides—the “top/front” and the “underside/back”. I am mostly interested in just covering one side, so that the plywood could still be seen on the other.

Here are a couple of images with my ideas: https://imgur.com/a/33qqNsU

I know there are companies online that can “heat press” your custom image onto plywood skateboard decks. I would like to acheive the same kind of look, but obviously, I don’t have a way to easily “heat press” any printed design I make to the curved chairs.

Ideally, I would like to have an image printed onto a thin surface that could easily be adhered to the curved plywood of chair. The template for “one side of” these chairs would easily fit in a printed rectangle about 48” tall by about 16” wide.

Does this sound do-able?
Are you aware of better solutions that simply
getting a big print,
applying it to the chair myself with some adhesive,
trimming the edges
and then applying some sort of gloss coat?

I hope to avoid the chair looking like some bumpy découpage project and more like the image is really a part of the chair (like how the heat-pressed images on skateboards look)

(My other ideas would be applying patterned paper or a thin sari fabric (the latter images on the above imgur post), or masking and spray-painting)

Thoughts?

posted by blueberry to Media & Arts (3 answers total)

I'm pretty sure you can do this with vinyl-- for instance, that's how people get those custom-printed brand decals on corporate cars. This video goes over some of the basics of vinyl wrapping wood.
posted by Bardolph at 3:14 AM on September 25, 2022

A gel medium transfer could work for this application, I think, and might even work with the map you already have cut out. I would of course experiment first using some of the scraps and a spare bit of plywood, but the steps are these:

1. If you don't want the plywood showing through (only the printing will transfer, not the white of the paper), paint any surface to receive the transfer white. I would use some kind of matte-finish spray paint.
2. Adhere the map, print-side down (text and images will be mirrored) to the entire surface using acrylic gel medium (from the painting/art supply section of the craft store). Be sure to completely smoothe out any bubbles or creases. Let dry completely.
3. Working one small area at a time, use a wet rag to saturate the back of the paper and gently rub it off until only the the printing remains. Let dry completely.
4. A "haze" of leftover paper fibres will appear when dry. Use a rag to apply a thin layer of Liquin (an oil painting medium you can buy at art/craft stores—a small bottle should be plenty), which should get rid of this. Any kind of oil or oil-based varnish should work, but Liquin is what I've always used.
5. Spray with polyurethane or similar to protect the transfer.

The map you cut already will probably transfer better than any print you could have made. Offset prints (e.g. magazine pages) and toner-based images (photocopies, laser prints) work great. Inkjet prints, in my experience, don't really work at all.
posted by wreckingball at 7:03 AM on September 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: (Just a note that the map I cut out was just to see the size of the template—not the actual image I want to apply to the chair.)
posted by blueberry at 2:34 PM on September 25, 2022