Custom Shoe Design
I play quite a bit of frisbee socially and I love wearing (aesthetically) loud shoes because they’re fun to be noticed. I love buying shoes – but I’ve always wanted to design my own.
Asics GEL-LETHAL 19
Adidas COPA PURE .1 FG
I want to learn!
For my degree in Industrial Design and working on cars, I’ve done a fair amount of painting, but never painted ‘clothes’. On first glance it didn’t seem too hard, but would be a big bang for my buck.
Also I figure that this is the first step I’ll do for a lot of shoes going forward – so it doesn’t need to be perfect.
I’m curious about
- Longevity – Frisbee is very aggressive sport on shoes – with tight turns and bursts of acceleration – will the paint hold up?
- Pigments – how bright are the shoes compared what shoe companies apply to their materials?
- Opening up unique personalisation – mica paints, printing – what else is there out there?
Inspiration
Ultimate Frisbee
Ultimate Frisbee is a self-refereed sport and employs a lot of hand signals so that everyone on the pitch can understand what is going on quickly when play has stopped.
I loved the idea of putting all these hand signals onto my shoes to help me remember is being signaled, and also spark conversations with fellow players (especially those new to the sport).
A first pass at design
Painting
Learning to airbrush acrylic
Angelus paint is the gold standard for leather painting.
Mica powder took me a while to figure out – but with enough thinner, it seemed to do the trick
Printing
DTF Printing
I investigated a few different types of technologies to transfer graphics onto shoes – I settled on DTF (Direct to Film) which is an iron-on transfer which is easily found on Etsy. Then it was a simple case of getting it printed and ironing on. I also applied a few protective coats of paint on top to keep it protected.
