Vincent van Gogh – Painting The Starry Night Over Canvas Shoes

It started from an article that I read in the Parents magazine that emphasized the importance of exposing children to a variety of fine arts. The article inspired me to do The Eric Carle Tissue Paper Art Project with my daughter, Little B. Last month, as I revisited the article from my ‘bookmarked’ list, I decided to explore Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night with Little B.

We tried recreating The Starry Night in a variety of ways. We made it with crayons, we made it with water colors and we even made it with food colors in our bowl of vermicelli. For a fortnight or so, we remained crazy with the painting. In that spell of madness, we decided for painting The Starry Night over canvas shoes. This was more like an upcycling project for us. Little B had a pair of white canvas shoes which she had hardly wore. This project put them to good use.

Painting The Starry Night Over Canvas Shoes

What Will You Need

Pair of white canvas shoes (you can take any other fabric-based shoes for this)

Masking tape (also called painter’s tape)

Acrylic colors

Variety of paint brushes

Acrylic color varnish

How To Go About It

Remove shoelaces.

Cut masking tape into 1½-2 inches pieces. Tape up these pieces on the parts of shoes you do not want paint on. I masked the tape over the side, the front and the tongue of the shoe.

Trace your shoes on a piece of paper. Use this tracing to plan your design for the shoe. You can make a rough design of what you want to create.

Mark your shoe according to the design that you have made on the paper using a pencil. If you feel confident, just put dots to mark the objects in the design roughly. If you do not feel confident about it, draw the entire drawing on the shoe using the pencil. Make sure that the pencil marks remain light enough or else they will show through the paint.

Paint the sky blue base color throughout the shoes. Let it dry.

Follow the steps to make this particular design.

I wanted to make a pale moon but that didn’t look impressive so made a blood moon instead.

Let it dry completely. This might take a few hours to a day.

Brush over the shoe a thin layer of varnish.

Remove the tape and put your shoelaces back on.

Now go ahead and rock your hand-painted, personalized, one-of-a-kind and classy Vincent van Gogh canvas shoes.

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