Painting my dancing shoes

... a process of combining art and dance. One that you can totally copy & do as well!

How it started vs. how it ended up.

I love to paint & to draw & to illustrate.

And I love to dance.

So I recently decided to combine those & paint my dancing shoes.

I feel like painting and dancing are two very basic creative actions we do as human beings! I am also convinced that we all can paint and dance.

And I myself was ashamed of dancing in my younger years, and shy to paint as well.

So getting over these fears & insecurities surely made me a bit more human again :)

Anyways, I got myself a pair of fabric, white Odds for dancing, knowing that they will get dirty rather quickly.

But these shoes were in size 34, which is perfect, cos I have very tiny feet & I rarely find proper sized shoes. So I went with these white ones anyways.

Then, the most ridiculous thing happened: they turned slightly grey-ish dirty & I felt like I would love to paint over that, so its not visible, but then I wont have white dancing shoes anymore… which I didn’t have anyways… make it make sense :D

Here you might not see their dirty-ness:

My dirty not-so-white-anymore dancing shoes.

Plot twist: two weeks ago I got myself new dancing shoes, from recycled leather, size 35 and white. THAT gave me the go of painting my fabric shoes, cos now I have another white pair ;).

So, the project began!

I first needed to decide which painting I want to paint on them, then it was time to sketch the basics on the shoe, can you guess the painting?:

Sketch of Vincent van Goghs Starry Night on my Odds, stuffed up with plastic bags for keeping the shape.

I had the immediate idea to use famous paintings of artists I love and also paintings that are easy to paint on the layout of a shoe like that.

Cos even though I love Miro or other abstract painters and their work, it was not easy to imagine them on my shoes.

I really love Vincent van Gogh’s paintings, we saw many of the original places he painted on our france vacations when we were younger, so I actually used ChatGPT to help me imagine if my idea worked.

I uploaded the right shoes, and the painting as well & told it to project it on the shoes, to see if it would work. And it worked, as you can see here:

ChatGPT output after adding mock shoes and a famous painting & telling it to overlay it.

I got hooked! I knew it would look brilliant, so I found a good reference of the painting and sketched my own version of it on the shoes. Cos as you can see here, and only if you know the original, it is modified and also only on one side of the shoe.

Here is the thing though: with art we can be as free as we want & I am not van Gogh, yet I can take his painting and make my own extended version of it and paint it onto my dance shoe.

So I started setting up my painting space on my living room table… or part of it, cos it was covered in books, plants & other crafts, and I really felt like I wanted to paint from my couch. Here is my setup of my workspace:

Living room table setup to paint my dancing shoes.

What this shows you is, that you don’t necessarily need a huge studio and fancy place. A tiny corner of a table in your place is enough. And you know… I have a whole painting room… which is currently storage & laundry room… so yeah, this needed to be okay enough :).

The actual first layer of paint:

Starting to paint my shoes…

I used acrylic paints, very basic ones, not my fancy artist grade paints, cos I didnt know if I will mess it up or not. That was still an option :)

I choose different blues & yellows & white and used quite some water with the first layer of paint to get the idea across what should be located where.

It did feel so nice to have the fist color on it & it felt easy too, the fear disappeared as soon as I started.

Oh, and I taped off the soles to keep the option of having them still white! And I took a kitchen towel to be able to paint on my lap, sitting on my couch :)

Here the next layers, this time shades of blue and some refinings of what goes where:

Some more blue & white & yellow… it slowly comes together…

You can also see why it was a good idea to tape off the sole, cos it became painted automatically.

The next version of this side of the shoe is almost done here, I took off the tape as well, not sure yet if I like it, I might still paint over it later on:

Left dancing shoe is almost done here!!

For the other side of the shoe I choose to mirror the painting in my own way. If you know how the painting looks, you know that on the left it starts with bushes and a big tree.

I decided to have the bushes and the tree on the front of my shoe, so the inner side of them needed to be filled somehow. Here you can see the process foto of how that went, including to paint the edges properly & fill up gaps etc:

Inner side of my shoe, extended/mirrored with van Goghs starry night.

I LOVE the outcome so much! It made me so happy to sit and paint these shoes and I cant wait to wear them while dancing! Literally walking in a famous artists shoes basically :D.

I thought that I want to have golden shoelaces to fit the awesomeness, but I put back the white ones on and it even looks good that way. Here you can see them on my feet:

Final piece of amazingness: my van Gogh painted dancing shoe!

Now, I might do some research into how to preserve that, because no, I have not done that until now.

Mainly because I know that acrylic paint wont get off of fabric, but maybe it is a good idea to get some preservative or so, just to protect it while I am dancing.

AND: the next project aka. shoe is waiting for me! Cos this was just my left shoe!

I still need to paint the right one and after thinking back & forth & finding suitable candidates, I think I decided to paint the right shoe with another painters brilliant piece.

So yes: I will have two differently looking shoes, and I couldn’t care less :D. It just adds to the amazingness!

I wont share which painting I decided to paint yet, but please feel free to suggest something. Knowing that I love abstract art & lots of colors!

What is a recent creative project you did? And would you like to know more details about this one, cos maybe you want to paint your own shoes ;)? Feel free to ask away, I will be happy to answer any question!

Love,
Daria