painting shoes.

As I was coming downstairs today, my mother asked me what my plans were for this afternoon.  I answered, "Painting shoes."
A little while later, she walked by my work station and laughed.  She thought I was going to paint a still life of my shoes.  Instead, there I was, happily painting away on my new ballet flats.

I bought this pair of ballet flats a week or so ago.  I love ballet flats, and I quite like the subtle pink color of these ones. However, I started wearing them, and realized that they were just too boring for me.  So I decided to spice them up a bit.

I did a little sketching first.  I've been looking at and photographing a lot of spring flowers.  I've been especially noticing crabapple blooms, like these.  I knew I wanted to encorporate them into the design somewhere, but also have some brighter, made up flowers too.  I didn't want the shoes to be too demure.

I started out by blocking in the design with white.  I wanted to put white down first so that the colors I added later would look brighter, and less muddy.  This step wasn't too important on such pale shoes, but would've been very important if I was painting anything darker.
I then added some defining outlines using burnt umber.
Then I just had fun.

the hardest part was getting the two shoes to match completely, even though their designs weren't symmetrical.
I don't know if this is normal, but if I'm painting two of something, one of them comes together almost effortlessly, and the other one fights me the whole time, threatening to turn into a sad mush of a piece.
However, the recalcitrant shoe (the right-foot one) finally came together, and i'm quite happy with my afternoon's work.
I had to take an obscene amount of photographs to show you how they turned out, because they look different from every angle.

And here they are on my feet.

I think my favorite part of the shoes ended up being the apple blossoms, though I think they needed the more colorful flowers as well.  I think I might buy a pair of grey ballet flats as well, and do them entirely in white apple blossoms, touched with pink. Mmmm, yummy!

As happy as I am with the shoes, I'm almost more thrilled with my impromptu pallets.  Maybe it's because I haven't painted in so long, but something about the mushy joy of unmixed pigments just thrills me.

Now I'm off to spray a sealant on my shoes, so that, hopefully, they'll stay beautiful for quite a while!

ps. if you want to look at some stunning flowers, check out Amy Merrick's web site.  I've been ogling it all weekend.  So lovely!