Meet the Robinsons: hand-painted

Last post I mentioned a new pair of shoes I was working on. Not that you all have been anxiously awaiting them, but I finally finished them today. I think.

The more I looked at the first pair of Texas Rangers shoes, the less I liked them. Which I am sure will be true for this next pair. I think I just didn't like the Target shoes in general compared to Toms. I still wasn't too ready to spend so much money on a pair of shoes that I might ruin, so I found a pair of shoes that looked more like Toms at Wet Seal.

They didn't have plain white shoes, so I had to choose between navy and red. For whatever reason, I went with the navy. I wasn't too sure the paint would show up very well on the shoes and it turns out, it took a lot of work and coats to get it to show up. Which is a shame, because I think if I would have had plain white shoes, I would have painted more and they would have turned out better. But overall I'd say I like these shoes better than the first.

And since I wasn't a huge fan of the first shoes themselves, I told my mom I was going to do her another pair of shoes. So here they are.

I had to take a short hiatus from my blog, because I didn't have much to blog about. But after a couple of days, I now have something to show for my absence.

A few months ago we found these shoes on Pinterest. Now, I'm a Rangers fan. But my mom is a RANGERS FAN. Serious.

So she has been teasing me about painting her some shoes off and on since we saw these shoes.

My mom has never worn Toms before, and 44-54 dollars seemed a little steep for shoes that I might very well ruin. Because let's face it, I am, admitttedly, a self-proclaimed terrible painter. So me messing up 50 dollar shoes was very likely.

So after a few months, my mom and I actually started looking for similar shoes. I finally stumbled upon these at Target.

Not much to look at. But they are similar to Toms and were only $16.99. We could deal with me messing up 17 dollar shoes.

So after googling my little heart out, trying to figure out if I should use Sharpies, Paint Pens, Acrylic Paint, or Fabric markers. I finally got started. I'm no expert on this by any means, but for those of you out there who might want to try this yourself, I'll take you step by step on how I chose to do them.

First, I drew a sketch on paper of what I planned on doing to the shoes. I am much better with pencil, paper, and sharpies than paint, so the sketch looks better than the end result of the shoes.

The flag is a bit off centered..but this is what I was hoping for.

Just as a side note, if you're up for trying this yourself, I would suggest not doing stripes. Atleast, if you are impatient like me. It's really hard to draw long straight lines on shoes. For me, anyways.

I finally started on the shoes. First, I drew the sketch in pencil on the shoes. I did my best to draw lightly, because pencil doesn't exactly erase off of shoes. (It helps to stuff at least the toes of the shoe with newspaper, plastic grocery bags, etc so that the shoes will keep their form.)

Pretty hard to see, but I think you get the idea. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to draw on the shoes.

The next step is probably not necessary, but it was helpful for me. I'm sure there is something better suited to use, but I decided that since my favorite thing to use is Sharpie, I would trace my designs with it. So I traced over all of the pencil in the color of Sharpie I would paint each design. I used my ultra fine tip Sharpies, for finer detail. Plus, the normal Sharpie markers seem to bleed more noticeably.

I was still nervous at this point about trying to paint the shoes. But I finally decided I liked the look of acrylic paint the best, so I went for it. I already had a ton of run-of-the-mill acrylic craft paint, but decided that acrylic paint used by actual artists would be better for this. There are several different types and brands of artistic acrylic paint to choose from, you can find them at Michael's, Hobby Lobby, etc. (I honestly just opted for Liquitex because it was the cheapest.) Acrylics aren't really made to paint on fabric, so I picked up some Fabric Medium at a local art supply store. It's supposed to help make the paint softer and keep it from cracking. I'm not sure it'd did that, but it was worth a shot. And because, as already stated, I'm not a good painter, I found a paint brush with very short, stiff bristles. It made it much easier to control where the paint went.

Nervously, carefully, and as slowly as I could handle, I started painting. I started with the lightest color and worked my way to the darkest. It took several coats to make sure everything was covered, but I was relatively pleased with the end result.