Wow! Your shoes are fantastic....I would think you definitly have a niche market to sell your work to! A great idea wonderfully achieved thought the use of shape, color and lighting.

thanks for the compliment, i'm glad you like them so much
i'm sure i have a niche market somewhere, i just haven't found it yet!

I love the colours for this painting, and ure van ones have a very retro feel to them which is great, how long did it take you for this particular painting?

thanks so much!
these are the quickest ones i do, they're smaller and simpler.
Hard to say how long, fit it in where i can. If i buckled down, say three or four evenings in front of the tv?! Drawing them first is the time consuming bit!!
But once you've nailed the shoes (which just takes patience and a steady hand to paint) the background takes about 5mins which is exciting at the end.
I paint the whole canvas buff before i draw. Then at the end i tint the white paint for the background with either blue (on the others) or pink here, and slap it on really randomly and thickly but leaving patches where the buff background shows through and it gives it a kind of rustic looseness cos you can see the strokes and unpainted areas.
The shadow is just the background colour tinted much darker, i fill that area in, then use a dry brush to feather over lightly where light background and dark shadow meet, and that seems to give that edge a blurred effect like a shadow has.
Am i giving too much info now? Just wanna help, am teaching myself as i go along, so find it useful to get tips off others. I've seen your lovely pics and you like to use light and dark, i'm sure you could do this.
To set up the shot, i just put my shoes on the kitchen table, lit them with a strong spotlight from the side to create the dark shadows, and photographed that to work from.
sorry about the essay! and thanks for the favourite!!

hehe thats cool, watching tv and paint O_O most I can do is like listen to music and paint

very nice! i love the tones in the right shoe...umm the left shoe is a bit awkward. i think it might be because the bottom of the shoe on the bottom left just blends into the surface... overall it is a very nice painting!

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"a little peace never killed anyone.....differences did"
Brian Deneke 1978-1997

i see what you mean! that bit was where the light hit the shoe and it really was that pale there, but probably should have defined it more for the pic?
this one was the worst to do, never do shoes that have the colour insides the same colour as the outsides.
i had to mix about 1000 different shades of green in the end!!
nightmare!

these are gorgeous.

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illustrations + photos

thanks so much redlettuce!