This past Mother’s Day, I had heard from another artist that you could customize Vans shoes with your own artwork…so I decided to treat myself to a pair of customized Vans with our art on them, and I was so excited!  …Until I got a message saying my order was cancelled, because of artwork issues–apparently, if the art is anywhere else on the internet, they assume you may have stolen the image–and I couldn’t get it to upload again.

The artwork I had chosen was a painting Myla and I did about letting your weirdo flag fly, which is up in my etsy shop… To me, it represented something we always try to teach her:  to be yourself, and be proud of all the weird things that make you special.

It was based on this picture I had taken of her, by the way, when she had built herself a paper astronaut helmet, spaceship, and bat sidekick.  Because I’m constantly amazed at her creativity and uniqueness, and I want her to always be proud of it.In any case, when the Vans order came back cancelled and I couldn’t get it to upload despite my best efforts, I was SUPER disappointed.

…Until my husband suggested I just get a pair of blank Vans and paint them myself.  So that’s just what I did.

As often happens when I am furiously gripped by a project I am obsessively compelled to do, I did absolutely no research ahead of time, and started by doing what I THOUGHT was a good idea:  smoothing out my painting surface with clear matte gel medium.  Maybe if I had taken a little time to research, I’d have left that step out (as I’ll explain later), and just painted directly onto the blank canvas shoes.

But I didn’t, and painted onto the surface I had treated with the clear gesso.  I had to alter the composition of our artwork a bit to get everything to fit on there the way I wanted, but I considered that a good thing–that I could change it up to perfectly fit the shoe space.

One of the upsides to painting the shoes myself (as opposed to using the customizer on the Vans page) is that not only could I alter the composition to make everything fit, but I could also put a different image on each shoe (the Vans page only puts the same image on both shoes).

So here’s what my final pair looked like:

Yay!  They really make me smile.

Now, remember when I said I’d probably leave out the clear gesso?  Here’s why:

See all those cracks?  I’m not sure, but I think if I’d left that step off and painted directly onto the shoe canvas, it might have clung to the fibers more tightly, and not have cracked so easily.  Who knows?  In any case, it’s not so bad–it’s not TOO terribly noticeable, and I can touch it up if it starts looking too bad.

So that was my mother’s day splurge!  That–along with spending the day with my husband and little munchkin doing fun things–made for a pretty darn awesome Mother’s Day!