"Red Comet" Custom Nikes

Main View

Inside Face

Front View

Back/Tongue View

Style Shot

The Base Shoe

Adding Gas and Stars

Adding the Comet

My first pair of custom shoes. This pair depicts a red comet streaking through a dusty nebula.

The shoes were made from Nike Hyperspike shoes, using acrylic paints and finishers, applied using a range of brushes and sponges, as well as my own fingers.

My goal for this project was to capture the youthful wonder that I had for space as a child.

In this light, I applied the nebulaic gas clouds of the shoe's upper with my fingers and a sponge, treating the clouds like a watercolor painting. The stars look very circular and dotted to emulate the simplistic understanding of stars I once had. To Roly the Toddler, a star was just a ball of white light floating in space, divorced from the concept of radiance and luminosity. The Nike Swoosh was painted in a bright, striking red to contrast it heavily from the rest of the shoe. As a child, I saw comets as big balls of flame soaring through space. As a result, I gave the comet on these shoes a treatment of flaming hot colors to convey the heat that I associated these bodies with.

The most prominent but least apparent symbol of this childlike wonder is the rocket ship on the inside of the shoes' tongues. The rocket has always symbolized adventure and new life to me, so I decided to cap off the shoes by adding it to a place that only I would see, a place that only I knew of.

This project took about a week to complete.

For more pictures/information on the process of their creation, visit this link: http://imgur.com/a/p2dXx