Its been a while since I had done anything, this was just a sort of fun project I did for myself experimenting a couple of things, I did change the patterns on it to be similar to 90s suedes, but nothing too crazy. I used hyacinth sensuede for the upper and a nice graphite tumbled leather for the formstripes.  Enjoy the pics, if you would like to see more, check out the flikr page:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sharp020/sets/72157627045994182/

On a side note, I let my good friend Mario Garcia take the pictures of the shoes, so they don’t look like my typical style, but he did a great job on them and I hope to take the future pics of the shoes with him, kudos to the man!

Was a Vans Era, it was supposed to be a christmas present, but due to my portfolio I never got it done on time. I had some complications with the embroidery on one of the heels so it held me back a bit, when I had finished the uppers I though that it was gonna go alright into the soles, but was then disappointed with the shape they turned out to have. It was one of the rare times I hadn’t done a last from the shoe prior to taking it apart, so I didn’t have anything to really shape it with. In the end  I scrapped the project, and made my mind on something else(which I’ll post next week if time allows), for now heres some pics of the failure:

Heres a little something something that took me a month of waiting, but with this I should be able to make some new interesting stuff, man shit is gonna be crazy, on a quick note don’t ask me where I got the last from, it took me and my friend a good long while to get it and were not really willing to share it yet:

My pricing will be a bit more expensive when I start taking orders again, labor alone will cost 400. The reason behind the increase is because I spend more time on hands with the shoe, I pay more attention to detail and make sure things come out right and if not do them over(I did that quite a bit last year). It got to the point that 300 averaged out in the hours that I spent on a pair of shoes would come out bellow minimum wage, and I like many others have bills to pay so that cannot continue.

The labor plus any extra fees, for example materials, embroideries, quilting and anything else will total at a high price depending on how intricate the shoe will be. A shoe of that price must be perfect of course, the only thing that has had me worried as of late is the durability of the glue on the soles, the upper themselves for me have come out really well or perfect on the last couple of shoes(except for my very latest vans pair) so I have to experiment with several glues and make sure they hold up to long and hard wear(everyday kind of shoe). So with that said, when I’m done with my portfolio I will spend a month or two just making shoes for myself or friends/family to wear in order to test out the durability of the shoes.

As you guys may know, I haven’t been taking orders for a couple of months now, still not taking orders btw, but I’ll get into that later. Since I didn’t have that extra income, I had to work extra hours at my “night” job, which the past couple of months wasn’t really a night job really, I opened up my availability and ended up working really random hours which would leave me tired and basically useless by the time I got back home(although I was able to pay off all my bills), so the progress on the portfolio was a bit slow BUT at least I’ve been working on it, ever since I had finished my AA, I had been saying that I was gonna find some time to work on the art portfolio, but because of working on shoes I never had the time during a full year to actually do something, so this break I been having has helped me with it, I still wish I could dedicate more time to it, but I’ll just do whatever I can.

Over the past two months I also had some family visits from Japan, so that paused me a bit as well, but family is important too.

So with this portfolio, the School which I intend to enter into is Parsons in New York, for that the requirement is at least 12 different art pieces. They mentioned it could be anything, so I’m putting in two pictures of my shoes in, what I’m planning to do with the rest is restore my old works I did in college and enter them in. At the time I had done them I wasn’t really planning on going into art school so I didn’t put as much effort as I’m doing today, plus at that time I was distracted by shoe orders, so they weren’t perfect. Another bad thing about my past work was that I didn’t store it correctly so now they have water damage and are dirty so even better reason to work on them.

Heres the ones I’ve been able to restore so far:

-Acrylic colorwheel/Graytone

I took a different pattern to make the new one and was able to get a better cut and organization into each panel.

Old:

New:

Dotted Sun:

The original assignment was to make a drawing using only short lines and dots, which the original was decent but I didn’t have the right rulers to pull some things off correctly.

Old:

New:

Cut up splatter:

The way this piece is done is that your supposed to get random rocks, leaves or whatever you can find that will make interesting marks on paper while using india ink, so you gotta make a big piece with all the marks, then cut it up and rearrange it while trying to keep it with a good composition and balance:

Old:

New:

In progress:

I’ll update you guys as I go, I have other things to post but I’ll do it later.