Acrylic and Fabric Markers on Hi-top shoes. Estonia. Spring 2020.
Finally, a real pair of converse. Took a few years but now I can say I made it 😅 Unlike the previous pairs in my Estonian collection, these are not knockoffs! I started painting these in early 2020, and as I am sure you are all aware, this is when Covid began to strike. I started working remotely from home (and still am!) While cabin fever was setting in, I had to find a way to spend my time. My mind was drifting toward the wide open outer space. You may have noticed I didn't paint any new shoes last year, so this is my first pair of custom shoes since 2018. I like to think that I still got it 😎
Usually when I am painting shoes, I concentrate my efforts on the outward facing sides. And I usually always start here. For my Vintage Sci-Fi pair, I started on the inside first. You can see why below 😊 When deciding on the colors for these shoes, some of them were chosen for me:
I do not have a 'before' picture, but here is a shot early on in the process. If you check this image, you can faintly see the lines here. There were actually small black and blue stripes tucked behind the logo on shoes before I started. I matched up the colors and started extending the stripes to the edges of the shoes! Black and blue wasn't enough for me, so I added some flashy magenta to help set the tone. It took me a while to come up with the theme for these. I had the stripes done but still didn't know what to paint on the outsides.
Finally I decided on a Vintage Sci-Fi theme, due to the fact that the lines started to look like laser beams, ha! The Vintage Sci-Fi genre has always caught my attention. Something about the imagination of people in the past about what the future will look like, has always sparked my own imagination. Some of my generic influences would be toys and comics featuring rockets and ray guns, and more specific influences are the Jetsons, Tomorrowland, the Rocketeer, and video games like Fallout. My non-vintage Sci-Fi influences mostly come in the form of books: Heinlein, Asimov, and Simmons.
Of course, the show-pieces of these shoes here are really the aforementioned Rocket and Ray-gun. Not-only because they are on the audience facing side of the shoes 😎 Not much to explain about the objects themselves since they are pretty self explanatory, so I will launch right in to the subtleties and art process! 🚀
It wasn't so easy to lay down the colors since the shoes were brown to begin with. You can achieve more color and brightness by starting with a light colored shoe. That means a lot of layers, painting the same shapes over and over again. I really killed my white marker on the rocket (totally worth it I might add)! Classic rockets are usually red or white, sometimes blue. You may know why I avoided painting a large 'red rocket' on these shoes. If you don't know why, then just trust me on that one 😁 So white it was. I chose white over blue as the main color because the blue makes a really cool shadow accent on the white. This blue was added after all the white layers were finished. One reason is that the blue pops out from the white more than the brown. The other reason was, when mixing colors with markers, then the white marker tip starts to turn blue. Same logic applies to the laser beam on the other shoe, and I was painting these two parts in parallel.
I had a lot of fun with the fire on this one too. Hopefully it looks like the rocket is propelling forward! Normally you would see the darker parts of a flame toward the middle, but I had to use the darker on the outside, otherwise the light color of the flames would get lost in the brown of the shoe. I tried to dampen the affect by added the white outline at the outermost part. Another benefit of having the darker red on the outside of the flames is that the blue fins of the rocket pop out against the light flames in the middle.
I struggled at first how to paint the outer space behind the rocket and ray-gun. I thought the darkness would overpower the objects on each shoe. This is where the brown shoes actually came in handy! I used it as a mid-tone between the outer space and it gives the sense that the rocket and ray-gun are glowing. No mistake what they are, and no over-empowerment by the vastness of space.
One thing to note as well, how I balanced the colors between the shoes. The rocket exhaust glows red to give a burning sensation, while the ray-gun is shooting a cold blue heated laser. As many of you know, it is actually the blue stars that burn the hottest. Taking a step further back, you will notice that the red on each shoe is toward the ankle while the blue/white on each shoe is towards the toes. No particular reason to match the colors to the body parts, but totally intentional to balance the colors forward to backward. This allows the shoes to match up despite the fact they depict two different types of objects. I know they both have the same theme of Vintage Sci-Fi, but the color balance helps to solidify their belonging in a subtle way.
I really hope you enjoyed this article and gained some insight into my art. I also included the progress gallery below for you. Thanks for reading! ❤
☮♥RSM.
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