I "decorate" most of my treestands with a couple of patterns I made myself. One is just a maple leaf that I found on the lawn and traced on a piece of cardboard. Then I cut it out with an exacto knife. This gave me a negative and positive version of the same pattern to play with. Then I did the same with the picture of a big buck off from a magazine (since I don't have any of my own to use!). The leaf patterns I'll use all over the stand and then put a couple of deer head pictures right on the seat (a couple of my stands have plywood seats so they work great for this).

Mrfritz gave you the right ideas about starting with a lighter color and using darker over it. I've been using just flat auto spray paints .... light grey for a base, Rust / primer color for a brown, flat black and sometimes some dark green depending on how I feel. They come out looking good and they prevent the hardware from rusting up.

Have fun!!! ... Shockwave