As promised, no felt on this week’s project. This one was decided on impulse, when I started thinking about shoes for travel. I’ve seen a couple of interesting things on Pinterest lately: painted shoes and collaged shoes. I thought of the perfect pair for this project: I have this wonderful pair of clogs — cushy, comfortable and cool. The problem is I’ve pretty much worn them to death. They’re black fake leather with red fake reptile wingtips, and even once they were completely shabby I invariably got comments about how awesome they are. But the black has pretty much worn away, though if I remember right, the wingtips are still in good shape. So I had this bright idea to paint them. I was thinking sky blue with painted clouds on the black parts, and maybe liquid gold leaf on the wingtips.

So of course I couldn’t find them. I do believe they’re somewhere — they’re too beloved to toss out without them looking WAY worse. But I found another pair of shoes, a cushy pair of clogs with a neoprene collar type thing that makes a strap across the heel. Comfortable, but pretty clodhopper-looking, so they look many years younger than their actual age. I didn’t think to photograph them before I started to pain them, so you’ll have to imagine a very dark brown, pebbly leather.

I took them and a bottle of neon blue acrylic paint to my art group, where I promptly appalled one of the women there. “You’re not going to paint them!” she said a time or two. “But they’re perfectly good shoes!” (We wear the same size, too, which probably made watching this desecration a little more painful.

But now they are perfectly awesome shoes.

Once I find the other pair of shoes, I have learned a few things of use. I will definitely need primer of some sort to get a pure color. I happen to like the teal that came from the combo of neon blue and dark brown, so I’m completely happy. But I dropped the whole sky idea and decided to decoupage something onto the shoes instead. Thought about something along the lines of a vintage picture from an old dictionary or encyclopedia, but nothing specific called my name and it seemed they’d be likely to be too small. So I leated through an art book I have that’s a small trim size but fairly fat, with a painting on every page. I found a bunch of them at a bookstore for $1 each because their spines were broken, so I bought several to hack up for art projects.

Found this one by Carel Fabritus:

Because, you know: birds.

The other thing I learned, paper doesn’t really like to curve around shoes, and once curved, may not want to stay that way. As my foot beds the shoe, little cracks are appearing, but I actually like them. I will put a few more layers of varnish over them to preserve them, wrinkles and cracks and all.