I first heard about this shoe from two of the law enforcement rangers, Nick and Jen, who said it had been lying at the trailhead for weeks and weeks and at this point it was up for grabs. So obviously I GRABBED IT. I wanted to really show the process behind turning these everyday objects into my work!! So here are some of the basic steps I take!
Step 1: Clean shoe
Step 2: Prime shoe with gesso. This not only makes it an easier surface to paint on, but for tricky areas like the laces it kind of acts like a glue.
Step 3: Lay a ground color down. I usually look at the landscape I'm about to paint and figure out what the main colors are. There were lots of greens and purples in my scene, so I used the complimentary color of green (red) as a base layer. This way, if my paint is less opaque in areas the red will peak through and activate the painting!
Step 4: Work back to front, or background to foreground. So it looks like the sky is actually behind the mountains and the mountains are behind the grass and rocks (because they ARE in real life)
Step 5: Paint all surfaces! I wanted to make this piece kind of like an oval panorama, so you have to turn the shoe around in order to see the entire horizon. I enjoy finding the unique shapes and lines of the object I'm painting and using that to work WITH the landscape I'm painting. Here, you can see I followed the different structural parts of the shoe, like where the sole met the base, and highlighting those moments with different colors. Make the shoe work for you!!
Step 6: Finished product! You can kind of see how the green of the mountain wraps around the entire shoe. And look at that orange ground peeking through!
Step 6.1: View from the "backside" of the shoe (even though there really isn't one way to orient it)
Step 6.2: View from another angle! I took the last three photos around 4PM so the sun and lighting were not exactly where I wanted them to be to match up with the actual scene I painted. Usually for a painting I "take it for a walk" 2-3 times before matching up the lighting.
Step 7: Get the alignment right! The lighting and clouds were just about perfect this night. I had just gone to a program that Ranger Sherri lead about the Butterfield Stagecoach at the Pine Springs Amphitheater and figured that was the perfect opportunity to document the shoe because that was the same place where my source image had come from a few weeks earlier! I loved how in this photo the line of the mountain just continued right onto the shoe.
Step 8: Have options! I loved the last photo, but the sky here was just too breathtaking to pass up. At this point I had to weigh what was more important: the alignment or the sky. I went with the latter because LOOK AT THAT SUNSET! But also because I got the lil moon in there.