Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Guest post #2!!

I'm excited to share with you a guest post from one of my favorite crafters-in-crime, Anna Moiso. These shoes turned out AWESOME and I can't wait to try them myself!! Enjoy!


Greetings! If you don't know me, I'm Anna, and I have the great pleasure of guest-posting on MCA! I am super excited about these GALAXY SHOES I made last weekend and can't wait to share! All the sentences so far have exclamation points!
Anyway....I originally got this idea from a crafting site I frequent, but if you google “galaxy shoes” you'll get many, MANY results. My basic plan was to take some old, cheap, black, Keds-type shoes and spruce them up in a space theme.  I began with:

  • shoes (obviously)
  • paint brushes/sponges
  • acrylic paint in pink, purple, black, white
  • newspaper (to protect the work area)
  • painters tape
  • black paper


I wanted to try out some color combinations/patterns before I worked on the shoes. I was going for a space clouds/nebula type look.


Ok, so the painting here is not very spacy, but I did get some ideas of how I wanted to mix the colors. It was also at this point that I decided I wanted to add a little water to the paint to make it slightly thinner. This turned out to be a good call :)
Next, I taped the soles of the shoes with painter's tape so I wouldn't get paint on the rubber edges. (also I took out the shoelaces!)  Then, I started painting the cloudy parts using a combination of colors and white. The sponge brush was great for this.



After I was pretty satisfied with the cloudy parts, I took a pencil and dotted everywhere with white paint in varying sizes (mostly small). I tried with a small paint brush at first, but the pencil worked better for me. Try both ways and choose your own adventure. :)



Things I would consider doing differently next time:
  • Find some sparkly acrylic paint – I think this would be VERY cool
  • Plan out my pattern of where I wanted to paint the clouds- the two shoes look pretty similar and I would have liked them to be a little more asymmetrical
  • Some slip-ons (vans style) would be very cool for this project too!


Thanks for reading and have a great crafternoon!
Anna