How to Create a Chinoiserie Lacquer Furniture Design

Cut sheets of paper to the size of the sides of your furniture. You can draw on these to make a full-sized pattern for your design. You can make a scale drawing, as well, but it is not as simple to use.

Examine photos of Asian art (particularly Chinese) as well as chinoiserie designs. To the Europeans who designed this style, information about Asian countries was limited. Accuracy to Asian art and culture was less important than the beauty and exotic "feel" of the design, so feel free to be creative and mix styles if you desire. Often, chinoiserie incorporated designs people immediately recognized as Asian, such as pagoda roofs, people with Chinese clothing, hairstyles and Chinese-style dragons.

Draw out your design on the paper. Make the design cover the entire paper. Chinoiserie designs can be quite elaborate and detailed, depicting entire landscapes or towns, but were typically two-dimensional and had little or no perspective to the image. Your design does not necessarily need to be elaborate, and can use flowers or repeating images, but should contain some images that, like the original chinoiserie designs, are immediately recognizable as Asian designs.

Determine which colors you will use and make notes on your drawing. You can use lacquer to color your design, but lacquer is a challenging medium. You can use paints instead, and coat your pattern with lacquer, or print out a design on paper and put it on your furniture, then coat with lacquer. The latter is a method of decoupage, which, if done correctly, imitates paint or lacquer designs well. If you do want to use lacquer for the design, it is better to limit the colors you use to one or two colors of lacquer for the design, and another for the background.