Shrinky Dinks and Shoe Doodles: Adventures in Coloring

by Sherri Stokey

Anyone who knows me will tell you I'm still a child at heart so it should come as no big surprise to learn I'm still a big fan of coloring!  I hadn't picked up crayons for a long time, although I've been tempted by the whole adult coloring book craze.  I have so many projects in my head that I never have time to get them all finished and I couldn't see a real "use" for colored pictures.

And then someone reminded me of Shrinky Dinks.

I went out and bought a brand new pack of colored pencils and downloaded a couple free coloring pages and made this:

Which turned into this once baked:

Squee!!!  How cute is that!!  I'll bet at this point you're wondering what in the heck that photos of shoes is doing at the beginning of this post?  I'm getting there, I swear!  I got bitten by the coloring bug and decided to take it a step further and try doodling on shoes.  

Now you have to understand - I can't draw.  I can look at a picture and sort of mimic a shape, but I really have no talent for drawing and realism and shading are beyond my capabilities.  I embraced that and decided to go for fun and colorful doodles rather than anything that's supposed to look like "art" and came up with these:

How fun are those!?  I'm pretty "chuffed" (as my UK friends would say)!  I took a pair of white canvas shoes:

Cheap white canvas shoes, I might add (and I think that's what allowed me to go crazy without worrying about ruining a "good" pair of shoes):

Then I took a box of permanent markers and got busy.  I started with a skull couple:

I'm not all that happy with the way they turned out.  I think I was a bit hesitant with my drawing so the lines aren't as crisp.  I sketched the outlines lightly in pencil and then went over it with a marker and it was hard to trace the lines exactly.  I also wasn't happy with the decorative details on the faces because the area was so small and the markers (fine line ones) do bleed a bit on the canvas.  It got better when I started just doodling without sketching first like the flower and vines.  

To try to keep the two shoes sort of the same (although I wasn't making a matching pair), I decided I'd better do some on the other shoe and go back and forth so I drew a skull on the other one.  This one is larger so I could get more detail in the decoration and I'm much happier with it.

As you can see, I just kept adding stuff and filling in white spaces.  I did try to add similar elements to keep them cohesive (like the blue flower with a magenta center on both shoes, etc.).

Can you tell I'm a big fan of the Day of the Dead?  I'm pretty excited about the Dia De Los Muertos: A Celebration of Life Challenge by Karen McGovern.  It's easy to play along: create something inspired by Dia De Los Muertos and reveal your designs on October 25, 2016 using the hashtag #lmajdod (full details here.)