May I Slytherin..? ;)

Happy holidays everyone!

I don't know about all of you, but I'm celebrating a very old tradition today. Chinese food and movies! Well...not entirely true. It's going to be Japanese food, but I'm still in the oriental family, right?

But seeing as not all of my friends are lucky enough to be Jewish, like me, I obviously have a list of Christmas presents to hand out to my favorite people in the entire world. Well, one girl in particular, essentially my other half - the evil twin in most ways. We're pretty much one person split into two, basically long lost sisters. And seeing as how we have everything in common besides parents, there's a common love of Harry Potter between us. We're both Slytherins, as luck would have it. So for the wonderful holidays, HP was the direction I took for her present.

Actually...this is how I came upon my idea. Well, as seen in my last post, another friend of mine asked for Toms painted with Mickey and Minnie mouse which I made for her birthday. Not knowing where to get Toms, since I, myself, never wear the things, I asked Kaitlin -my other half. Then, as I surfed Pinterest (always Pinterest!) I came across some really lovely Ravenclaw Toms. I sent a picture of them to my Kaitlin, saying that they would be *totally awesome* in Slytherin style. (Heh, did you get my Very Potter Musical reference there? Heh heh) Well my twin here replied by asking, all excited, if I was making her Slytherin Toms, which would explain why I asked her where to buy them?! Alas...that was not my logic at all...so I told her politely that, no, I wasn't planning on making them, sadly. And I really wasn't. I just thought the shoes looked cool. But now I had the perfect present to give her for Christmas, and this way she would still be pleasantly surprised to see the shoes. :)

And that's when I began the quest for the perfect design. So I opened Pinterest back up, as always, and searched for Slytherin Toms. I came across these bad boys which came from haleykayarts Deviantart account. I really like the idea of having the house crest there, but I didn't want to do exactly the same shoe not only out of respect for the original artist but also so that, heaven forbid the shoes were too small for Kaitlin, I could always sell them on Etsy or something later.
Luckily I did have the right size shoes, and all was well! xD






So then I set out to find a standard house crest to work from and this here is what I came up with.









Then I got off my lazy butt and went in search of supplies. After many tedious hours of gathering the energy to get out of the house, I went to several stores and got these gray Toms. I also bought some more of those craft paints I used in my last post for those Mickey and Minnie shoes. This time I got gold, silver, green, and yellow. Plus I used the black and white paints. I also had my black sharpie paint pen, which is really handy for more or less sketching out designs. And I like how shiny the sharpie paint looks when it dries, too.



Last is the brushes which I stocked up on at my local grocery store. I also talked about these in that last post, but basically it's a bag of 25 brushes for $5 and they're really surprisingly good quality. The only real problem I had was that there weren't any brushes small enough to get really fine details. What I found myself doing was painting things thicker than I needed them, and then painting over the edges with another color to create the really fine lines. But that's still a rather risky way to go about it...

Now, I didn't document the whole process but I started out with the green shield in the middle, got the snake on, then put in the scroll that says Slytherin on the bottom. From there I did the knight's helmet and worked the scrollwork down the sides. And even though I started this about two weeks before Christmas, I still found myself scrambling at the last minute to finish them. So the details on either side of the shield don't entirely match up to the house crest itself, but it really isn't that big of a deal, and I still like it. Then I painted around it in green -mostly to cover my many mistakes and partly to cover more of the shoe. And I went with a snitch on the second shoe which I really don't care for honestly, but I had no time to do anything better. And this time crunch also prevented me from getting stripes or anything else onto the shoes. This is the final result that I was left with in the end and, aside from the less impressive snitch, I am really happy with the shoes in general. And I do love how the crest came out with.

 



So that's the story! Let me know if there's anything I can make for you, and I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season! Happy New Year everyone!

For the love of Disney. And shoes.

About two months ago, a very lovely friend of mine hinted -ever so lightly- that she would like me to paint her a pair of shoes with Mickey and Minnie Mouse on them... by texting me that she wanted me to make these for her.

I'm not entirely sure where she came across them, but for the first time thus far, my project was not pinterest inspired! So...I hopped right on to pinterest. I wanted see what other people had come up with because, for one, I didn't exactly want to copy what another person had made and, for another, I was not very big on the idea of having the characters be on the sides of the shoes.

Then I came across this photo and I'm pretty sure my heart skipped a beat...

Once I regained functional thought, I continued to surf around for other interpretations of the above shoes. I found several pairs but nothing that really struck my fancy, so I moved on to finding a good picture of Mickey and Minnie themselves that I thought would be good to use for my own work of art.

Finally I came across this adorable photo which in turn became the inspiration for my final product. I used those poses, with the colors from the original picture my friend had sent me. And this is what I came up with! (SPOILER ALERT)

Now here's how I magicked these beauties into being:

Let's begin with the supplies, shall we?

 

I used five different colors for the whole project: red, yellow, white, black, and fleshtone. I went to the local craft store and just picked up some folkArt paints - the cheapest craft paint you find will work just fine. That's what I went with here. Although, I really only bought these paints because I happen to have left ALL of my art supplies back at school.

Well I gathered all of my necessities and just today I went and sat down to start this little production. Yes, two months after my friend actually sent me the picture of what she wanted. And as I begin to paint with my bottle of red, I realize there's a little something funny going on. Only to discover, of course, that I carelessly bought Enamel acrylic paints, which are specifically meant to be used on glass and ceramics...and since I decided, as always, to wait until the last minute to start anything, I had no choice but to go ahead and use it.

In a nutshell, that was my way of saying BE CAREFUL and pay attention to what you're buying. Make sure you're getting a regular acrylic craft paint or whatever you choose to work with. And you might notice that the fleshtone is a different brand of paint. That is merely because I couldn't find anything remotely fleshy in the folkArt collection (although I doubt it helped that I was looking in the enamels...) so I just moved over one section and bought from whichever brand I could find with a color I liked.

And then I got one of the Sharpie Paint Pens just to help out with the details of things. It's just plain black with a fine tip. They're super handy!

As for the brushes, I am extremely fond of this super pack that I found some time ago at Publix, which is my local grocery store if you're not familiar. It's just this handy little mixture of all types of brushes including ones meant for acrylic, oils, watercolor, whatever. And it also comes with those weird spongy things that I have no idea how to address. I believe it's twenty-five brushes total, and it only costs around five dollars. No, they aren't the kind of brushes you should be planning to execute your next masterpiece with, but they are really quite impressive quality for the price.

Yet again, I went out and bought myself a pack of these because, as I said, I left every kind of art supply I own back in my dorm.

 

Finally, and probably most important, I got the shoes for this here charade. They're just regular old Toms in red. I'm not a huge fan of these myself, but my friend happened to be extremely fond of them. But the really great thing about these shoes, and converse for that matter, is that they are made from canvas. I'm sure there's several other canvas shoes, too, and they're all great for these kinds of projects. It makes it really easy to simply paint right onto the shoe without having to prime or worry about anything. Although, if you wish to prime in some way, by all means! I also didn't seal the paint, but I would really have liked to use that waterproofing shoe spray I've heard so many great things about. But, yet again, having waited till the last minute, I didn't get the chance to make sure I had all of the right supplies for this job.

 

So the first thing I did was try to find a way in which I could sketch out my design before I went full out and made sure these shoes could never be returned. Alas, I was unable to draw in pencil and have any substantial results and, like the rest of my worldly possessions, my graphite and charcoal are tucked away under my desk at school. So I actually took a piece of paper that was about the size of my shoe surface and sketched out the figures loosely. I somewhat marked a guideline on the shoes of where the head should start an end to begin the process. Then I took my handy dandy paint pen and came up with this.

 



Starting with Mickey's head, I worked my way down until I had a full body and did the same thing on the second shoe with Minnie Mouse. These were pretty rough and I definitely was not happy with the overall look of them, but it was certainly a start.

From there, I started blocking the easy things in like the black spaces on Mickey (his ears, most of his face, torso, legs). Then I got some white spots, and actually painted red on his shorts. This was where I ran into trouble with the enamel paints. The color was too translucent so it needed a few coats in the areas where I had to cover up the problems I had with the paint pen while sketching. And then I started on his face, covering all of the details I had put into it and using this opportunity to elongate certain areas and get a better shape that I was looking for. This, too, took a few coats, but the paint was regular acrylic and wasn't too much trouble. From there it was just a matter of getting in the rest of the details and cleaning up my lines and such.

 



 

After that I moved on to shoe number two and started working with Minnie Mouse. Knowing what I was doing from shoe one certainly was a big help, so I started this time with the flesh to make sure I had the right shape for the face before moving on to the rest of it. Then I just went through the rest of the process, from the color blocking, to outlining the while polka dots with black lines.

 

And thus I came to the final result!

 

 



Now, here's the spark notes guide for anyone who wants to skip my psychobabble:

 

Supplies:

• Red, white, black, yellow, and fleshtone craft paint
• Black Sharpie paint pen, fine tip
• Cheap, but decent paint brushes as small or large as you feel is needed
• Le shoes - of course
• A GREAT CAN-DO ATTITUDE

Okay you don't really need the last one but...can't hurt right?

Then you can simply sketch out your design however you like, maybe go straight to the paint pen if you feel confident.

Paint in all of the colors and details and voila! You have a pair of custom hand painted shoes.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, I didn't seal these in any way. In the future, I might change that, but if you want to now, I've been told there are sprays you can buy at maybe a craft store or something which seals the shoes so they will be waterproof I believe. Obviously I haven't looked much into it, but I know such sprays exist. Otherwise, I have seen a nice waterproofing tutorial on pinterest which seems like a really great way to go about it if you have the few minutes to spare. It really wouldn't take long.
The pin itself and the actual website.

Let me know what you guys come up with!