- Part 2

Weekend, semi-fruitful?

On Saturday I cut up all of the paper patterns, brainstormed a bit on exacltly what colorway/materials and method I wanted to use to accomplish this design and then called it a night. The next day I got up late due to nightmares, they were scary! Anyways, I wasted almost no time after waking up, I prepared some canvas and folded the edges on whatever panels I could at the moment, unfortunately the method I had though up the previous night didn’t work, so I went ahead and brainstormed a bit more and found a different way to get what I want, so back to the computer it was. Up to this point I still haven’t finished the work on the computer and I’m about to call it a night so it will be something I will have to finish up tomorrow.

I wanted to dedicate my Sunday to working on the crosshatching piece for my portfolio but I took much longer then I had expected with the shoe, so I only got one strip done today, I will switch the emphasis between the two for the next several days in order to get it done. Good night everyone!

Quilting on mind.

Sorry for not updating in a bit. I have gotten a couple of things done but had found it hard to find some time to get on here, first would be the portfolio piece that I finished a couple of weeks ago, here is a picture of it:

It felt great to finally get it done, it was pretty complicated trying to get all of the panels in the corresponding shade, but I’m really happy with both of the parts inside of this piece.

I already started on the next one which is supposed to be an exercise on cross-hatching and stippling, it will be the hardest(most time consuming really) piece I gotten up to this point. When I had done my original piece a couple of years ago, it turned out faster but less detailed because I wasn’t able to flex some of the parts to get very accurate with it, now I pay way too much attention to small details so this sort of thing is going to get really mind numbing. What I have to do is to remake the “cut-out” striped exercise I had done before, but this time with markers. This is how its looking so far:

The second picture shows a bit how I am working on it, which is basically to put it side by side and with a pencil work out the shapes until I’m happy with how it looks and then fill it in with markers, the splatters are really hard to work with since I gotta give it a certain edge to each circle. I’m actually just a bit farther ahead then this picture, but so far I’m only doing the complete back spots. Then I have to come back around and put on the actual cross hatching and stippling.

Now with the shoes, I mentioned before that I was going to redo part of my converse to check out the durability of the glue, not too surprising, I finished them up. I redid the tongue/toe into a black canvas to give it breath ability becasue the previous set up had a polyurethane coating which even though it made it waterproof, it didn’t make it breathe so my feet were getting pretty sweaty. I redid the embroidery on the tongue with my new logo and glued it using a somewhat new glue I had and tried out a method suggested by a friend.

Worn in the rain for fun!

I have been wearing them for a couple of days and so far no real separation has happened, there were some tiny spots that got loose, but it was due to an inferior glue line fix I had used initially, so I went on it around and figured out how to fix it so now its working great. The plan with these is to wear them for a straight month, if nothing happens at all then I will start taking orders for vulcanized shoes.

This weekend I got a very rare opportunity for myself, which is Saturday and Sunday off from work, so I’m hopping to get a bunch of stuff done. Today I’m working on the blazers for my sis over in Japan, I finally decided on the quilting design(post’s title lol) meaning I can finally get the work started on them, I was also waiting to see how the glue would turn out with the converse before working on these, but I got a good feeling on the glue job so I will redo it here on the blazers.

My quilting is a work of precision, which unfortunately had made it difficult to decide on something initially, lets see how much I get done today. Tomorrow will be dedicated to work(and hopefully finish) the cross-hatching piece.

Almost done

I spent almost all day on this piece, I only need about a hour more to finish it up, but I’m collapsing so I have to leave it for later in the morning, it turned out a bit easier then I had thought(which was why I was procrastinating so much with it before) but I’m pretty happy with the progress I made on it today, heres a pic of it in progress:

Tomorrow is my day for shoes, but I will spend one hour of it to finish this piece up. Now with the shoes, I’ve decided to go with the quilting on the blazers but I will take a small break on them and work on something else. I got an experiment to try out tomorrow using two different glues, I’m gonna use my Converse weapons for the test since the last glue I had used on them completly didn’t work. I’m also gonna change up the toe/tongues on them from the camouflage nylon to duck canvas to give it more breathability.

Patterns done

Today I dedicated my day to “shoe work”, I finished up the patterns on the computer, I was hoping to also finish up the quilting pattern too, but I couldn’t make up my mind on what kind of quilt I want to use, and at one point I wanted to just trash the quilt idea. In the end I still haven’t decided what I’m going to use for it, so I’m just going to sleep it over and hopefully in the morning I will have something. If not I can just continue thinking it through tomorrow, which will be my day dedicated to the portfolio.

I was hoping to put some work into the portfolio on Friday, but I stayed up really late on Thursday and got up really early on Friday, so on the time I was supposed to dedicate to work on it, I just basically napped so that I wouldn’t fall asleep while riding my bike. Somehow I did manage to fit in about a hour to start up the patterns on the computer for the blazers, but it wasn’t supposed to be for that day ha ha! I’m gonna make sure I make up for the lost work in the morning.

Here is the fourth art piece from the “color and composition” group I have to finish:

This was a lot harder then it looks, I ended up making this almost four times, the first two I was using India ink which had a nice tone, but I didn’t know that it wasn’t waterproof so while working on it I put my sweaty hands(from hours of working on it) on some of the black parts and viola, I had smear marks on it, so I had to start all over, I went on to look for some markers instead and bought myself some Copic Multiliners, of different point widths and various refills, after a couple of more hours(spread through several days) I finally ended up with the piece above. I’m pretty happy with it, its not something exactly mind-blowing but it works for what I needed.

The past couple of weeks

I have been working on some sketching exercises and “visualization” basically perspective stuff, but I had gotten way too into it, so I haven’t been able to actually work on the portfolio which as some of you might know, is why I’m taking the break. I decided to change up my daily schedule a bit to put less emphasis on those sketching exercises I was mentioning and dedicate more time on other things, one being the portfolio and the other being shoes, I’m gonna get more active with them then before, so hopefully if everything goes as scheduled I should have a new shoe done within 1-2 weeks, and probably a month from now I will start taking orders again.

Heres how far I’m at the portfolio, on the last update I had done three pieces, now I’m at the fifth(I’ll upload the fourth later today) which is supposed to be based upon this piece I did a about two years back:

The top section is pretty easy to do, just time consuming, its supposed to be a trace of the left paper piece in order to make a trail. the bottom piece doesn’t exactly take as much time, but its just a bit of a brain exercise to get the right panels in the inverted colors by the edges. I’ve been procastinating on this for almost a month so today I finally gotta put some work on it, heres how far I’m on it:

Well yeah, thats gonna be fun haha!

Now with the shoes, I’m currently working on some blazers for my sister over at Japan, initially they were supposed to be the vans I had posted a couple of months back, but due to the lack of a last they had turned out all wonky, this time I actually got one in hand so it should be a different story. This is the base:

I already took them apart, and started the pattern making so I should have some interseting pictures later.

Concluding what I had mentioned in the beginning I will be alternating days between working on shoes and my portfolio, so later today I will be working on the portfolio and tomorrow(Saturday) I will work on the shoes, this will keep me posting basically daily and you can see how things turn out and how long it normally takes me to work on such projects.

Puma Suede Lows – Hyacinth/Graphite

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!

The last shoe I had worked on.

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:

Future pricing…

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.

A bit of an update.

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:
Old colorwheel

New:
New Colorwheel

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:
Old Sun

New:
New sun

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.

Site back up.

I went through a couple of changes with it, and even though the site looked nice for a bit, I had some problems with the DNS, so I made it back into a wordpress blog. I’ll update this a bit more next week.

For the meanwhile, heres the link to my flickr page with my customs shoes:

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

As most of you know, I’m not taking orders at the moment, because of school, it will stay like this for at least two more months, that doesn’t mean you won’t see work from me until then, at the moment I’m dedicating my saturdays and sundays on customs shoes, so I’ve got two customs I’m planning on getting done soon, I took the bases apart last week and right now am working on the patterns(1 down already), some simple stuff, but with really nice quality.

Also the contest for my N-SB.org custom shoes already went up, if you haven’t bought a ticket for the raffle, you definetly should!

http://n-sb.org/5/5th-anniversary-dunk-contest/contest/

Now to finish up this post, I’ll post up a teaser: A vans era with a colorway that I used on some pumas years ago.