How hard is Painting Chinoiserie?

I like the “Chinoiserie” style of furniture-for those unfamiliar, it is furniture with a shiny black laquer finish, with gilt-painted scenes on it-usually with a Chinese motif 9temples, trees, figures). Chinoiserie-style furniture is currently out of style, and is quite hard to find. anyway, can you do it yourself 9via stenciling)? is it fairly easy to do? i’ve located quite a bit if Chinoiserie-style furniture on EBAY, but the shipping costs are enormous. So I’m wondering if i bought some used furniture, and painted it myself-could i do a decent job?

They definately sell Chinoiserie-style stencils. And a crafty person could certainly make a reasonable approximation of this type of thing using stencils and painting techniques. Stenciling is pretty hard, though – especially the really fine sort of stenciling you’d be doing with those sorts of designs. You’d need to practice a lot first.

But stencils are reuseable. So you could buy the ones you want and practice as much as you need to on scrap wood. Same with the faux-marbling, if you wanted to do that, too – you’d just need to practice a lot first.

It really depends how fussy you are. If you’re determined to get that deep finish through many layers of black or red laquer, I imagine it’s quite hard. Plus stenciling is not the same as full-on figural painting. But if you’re not that particular, and just want the general impression of chinoiserie, sure, you could paint a piece of furniture black, stencil some Chinese motifs on (probably this would work best with purely geometric patterns, for which you could even create your own stencils), then put a glossy finish on.