Spoon Sports Air Jordan 1

One day during the Covid lock down my husband asked if I would be interested in learning to custom paint sneakers. 

He proceeded to show me a 100 plus page powerpoint deck of racing liveries and Nike designs he’d created.  I knew about his love of cars, however I didn’t know about his love of sneakers. It’s interesting how you can know someone for decades and still not know everything about them.

I was intrigued to try something new, it had been a long time since I’d worked on something non-photography related. I knew nothing about custom sneakers and quickly discovered there is a huge sub culture of customization.

Using a lighter color paint than the base shoe color created a challenge; 7 to 8 layers of paint were required to fully cover the dark blue, this resulted in the paint cracking at the bend seams. Lesson learned.  For the next shoe I would start with an all white base unless the design could utilize the color way to its advantage. 

I’m not the best at drawing so I decided to make some stencils out of electric tape to help with the design. I struggled to visualize the inverted design as I made the stencil.

I used a very small brush for the Air Jordan logo and painted it carefully by free hand.

And for the tongue tag, I used a thin piece of plastic fitted under the tag as a barrier for the blue paint. The last thing I wanted was for blue paint to bleed onto the bright yellow tongue.

Overall I think they turned out okay. My husband was happy, he has a custom sneaker of his design and that’s what really matters.

If you’re curious about my husband's love of sneakers, take a few minutes to watch his YouTube video.

I didn’t know it at the time but this project kick started my art practice in a new direction.

Love E