Have a seat: an Adirondack adventure

Sandy Bottoms

Adirondack Chair

Hand-painted by WAGG (Wednesday Art Gallery Group)

Up for raffle at The Sandwich Arts Alliance

My weekly painting group recently completed this Adirondack chair to help with a fundraiser for The Sandwich Arts Alliance. There are 30 chairs in all that are currently on display in Sandwich MA on Cape Cod for the remainder of the summer. Then they will be auctioned off in September. To see all of the chairs and to download a map, click here.

Each week, for about 2 months, we met up at the Art Gallery At Patriot Place to work on our chair. We had such fun painting the chair together as a team, and we took several photos along the way. I've included some here to show you the steps in our process.

Our chair arrived all primed with white. The chairs are really high quality, made by a company in Canada call The Best Adirondack Chair Company. They even fold up for easy storage.

 

After brainstorming ideas for what to paint on our chair, we thought it would be fun to paint the chair to look like a beach towel was draped over it. We chose this colorful towel and colorful chair as our prototype.

Then we sketched out ideas for which summer icons we wanted to include on the towel and narrowed it down to starfish, shells, fish, beach ball, waves, flip flop, and a sun. Later we added a lighthouse, and a sailboat.

We tackled painting the bright green background color first, using both spray paint and brushes. It was a very challenging spray painting in the windy conditions outside the gallery at Patriot Place!

I had to be "flexible" to make sure all the nooks and crannies were covered on all sides and underneath.

We then traced our design on to a large sheet of tracing paper.

Then we transferred the design on to the chair using graphite paper making sure to add a "fold" on the towel for added interest.

We began by painting the black outlines around each design first.

Then moved on to painting each of the summer images. We were surprised by how many coats of acrylic paint we had to use to get good coverage on top of the bright green background.

Here you can see our prototype chair next to our painted chair.

When we decided to name our chair "Sandy Bottoms" we discovered that it was also the name of a summer cocktail, so we painted a cocktail napkin to the arm of the chair with the recipe written out.

After several coats of polyurethane, it was then ready to deliver to Sandwich. I was happy that the chair fit inside my car upright.

The Sandwich Arts Alliance had a fun opening reception to view all 30 chairs. Each chair was presented with their artists and their sponsors. 

Some little ones having some fun in the chairs.

Our sponsor ended up being the SAA which means it will be on display there all summer where you can buy raffle tickets.