With stars on my shoes

The options for comfortable, reasonably priced vegan footwear, though growing every day, still isn’t enough for my tastes. I have leather shoes from my pre-vegan days that I have been wearing until they fall apart. I still have a couple pairs that have seen better days but aren’t ready to be tossed. So, I decided to reinvigorate them with paint.

I did some online research and found that Jacquard Lumiere and Neopaque paints work well on leather shoes. I bought two “Exciter” packs of paint, one with small bottles of seven colors and one with nine colors. I painted one pair of shoes. Then, a pair of sandals. Since the sampler assortment were all metallic (the Lumiere line), I then to buy some bottles of Neopaque (non-metallic) colors. I then painted two more pairs of shoes. I now have a shoe painting addiction.

I painted a comfy pair of BØRN clogs with Pearlescent Blue, straight from the bottle. The color was more metallic than pearlescent. And it was very electric. So I did a second coat with Pearlescent Blue to which I’d added a touch of Neopaque Black. I had painted the insole Metallic Olive Green and it was too bright. So I did a second coat, adding Neopaque Black to darken the color, giving it an antique feel.

I was listening to the Cat Steven’s album, Catch Bull at Four and the song, Boy with a Moon and a Star on His Head was playing. It occurred to me that I could paint anything I wanted (or was capable of painting) on my shoes, so I decided on stars. The star motif -- used a lot in the 1970s -- is one of my favorite motifs. I experimented with freehand Metallic Gold stars on the insole. They came out alright, so I took a deep breath and painted stars on the upper band of the clog.

Somehow the surfaces lacked definition, so I painted a Sunset Gold and Pearlescent Violet band around the insole and on the edge of the top part of the shoe. The two colors got a bit lost on the upper band so I painted over it with just the Sunset Gold. I also painted the band along the lower edge in Sunset Gold.

The cream-colored stitching in the platform didn’t look right, so it got touched up with Pearlescent Violet. One of the websites had recommended putting an acrylic sealer on the paint.

After a few days, I put two coats of sealer on the upper part of the clog and the insole. It gave it a shiny appearance that I didn’t particularly like. But is also made the insole a bit slippery. So I stripped the sealer off with some ammonia and decided not to seal the three other pairs of shoes I painted.

Soon after painting my clogs, I found a never-worn pair of electric blue tights for 99 cents at the thrift store.