Crafting

Branching out… shoe customisation (#1)

Once again I’ve had a good idea waaaay too late in the day. Walking through town With Ollie (hoping for baby to nap so I could grab a sneaky coffee and book break) I wandered into Schuh and saw they were having a sale on kids shoes including some plain white converse style lace ups. Whelp, I thought to myself ‘I could customise those…’ so down the YouTube rabbit hole I went watching a bunch of customisation vids (best selection below). By the time Ollie had finished his nap I had chosen a design, bought the paints and peripherals and was wandering back to get the shoes.

I checked out what peeps normally charge for custom painted converse and even for kids shoes they tend to run to the high side of eighty quid. These shoes were £9.99 and the paints set me back another £20. Let’s see how these turn out…

I did what I normally do in this situation and I watched a ton of YouTube tutorials before getting started, if you’re thinking of giving this a try I recommend subscribing to these guys…

So now I think I know what I’m doing in theory I started by prepping the surface of the shoes. As they are cheap vinyl I gave them a good wipe with some acetone nail varnish remover then went over them with some fine grit wet and dry paper then again with the nail varnish remover. Then I had a go at laying out the design I had chosen in pencil.

I decided to try and replicate this as it has simple colours and really strong outlines, no shading for me 🙂

The painting was actually awesome! I stuck to the advice of lots of thin layers (made it much easier to correct mistakes caused by shaky hands (too much caffeine, mummy needs more sleep…)). I gave up on the helicopter after two attempts and just did a cover up job, I think how this looks against the sunburst is so cool.

Usually when I craft I have something I’ve watched a million times before in the background so this time I decided it was apt to paint while watching the big guy himself 😁

On to side 2… I had no idea what to do here before I started, I was kinda hoping something would strike me while painting… and it did 🙂 I looked up what Alex would look like in kanji characters and it’s sooo cool!

I continued with the red base and black edging and then went in with the white and (gasp!) free-handed the first layer and you know what? Sometimes just going for it really pays off, I have a bad habit of overthinking things when it comes to making then getting myself totally tied up in knots, having a really tight deadline to work to helped me push through.