When it comes to designing, your mind may take inspiration from the most random of places so when this happens, you better hope that you brought your trusty friend (the sketchpad) with you. My tiny sketchpad is where I start any designing. It is where I put vague ideas on paper straight from my mind so that the freshly picked thoughts aren’t forgotten about by the next time I want to develop them.
If my mind urgently needs to draw the idea on paper, I will do this first before writing down key points on how I want the final design to look. I will draw several sole units before I select my favourite which I will work with, develop, and finalise. So that I can later refer back to the concept, I then draw the other side of the sole but after this, it is time to start creating upper ideas so I re-draw the sole unit on a new side of paper and based off of the previously-made notes on how I want the shoe to look, I begin with vague sketches of the upper and once I like how the ideas are coming together, I can go over them with a darker pencil shade. To fully say to myself that I have finalised the design, I draw the shoe again in my larger sketchbook. To be certain that I am drawing with proper proportions of the shoe style, I refer to ‘How to Draw Athletic Shoes’ by Mark Kokavec’s Render Demo which teaches you how to do this and gain many more valuable drawing skills. The book has seven chapters full of useful content for anyone wanting to develop their design abilities and I would definitely recommend this book as it contains almost everything a footwear designer would need. The book by Render Demo even begins by introducing you to foot anatomy before you come across a shoe.
‘How to Draw Athletic Shoes’ also teaches you how to draw shoes in the perspective angle so the next thing I do is refer back to the previously-drawn side view of my design and create the perspective angle drawing.
Since the book teaches you how to draw shoes at different views, you can also try them out and add your sketches to your design composition in the end but the final drawing that I chose to add here is the outsole concept as I feel that it’s important to visualise this aspect of footwear.
Digitally drawing all of my finished designs would be the next thing that I would do so with my Wacom tablet and Adobe Illustrator for PC, I now draw the outlines of all of the shoe sketches. I like to make sure that all of the lines are cleanly drawn, so I change the brush setting to have increased smoothing.
Obviously before I can begin using Adobe Illustrator, I have to somehow upload the paper sketches onto my computer, and this can be a little more difficult if you don’t have a scanner. To do this, you can use your phone camera to take a top-down photo of each of your drawings and either connect your mobile to PC via cable and transfer the photos manually or you could simply email yourself the high-resolution photos.
Before I was gifted the Wacom tablet some time in 2019, I would use a mouse to draw the footwear on a computer and it would take hours to meticulously use Adobe Illustrator’s pen tool but now that I’ve had plenty of time using a tablet, I can say that purchasing one will shave hours off from your digital design on all adobe softwares and although the tablet saves plenty of time, you will have to put in some time in the beginning to get used to looking up at your monitor while below, you are sketching on your tablet with a stylus. Instead of looking at the paper on which you draw with a pencil.
When I’m using Adobe Illustrator, I will draw the outlines of the shoe but I will make the lines extra long so that they overlap and later I use ‘expand appearance’ to remove the extra length from the lines and clean them up. Once I have all of the outlines drawn up and looking clean, I export the artboard as a PNG so that the file is saved with a transparent background and all that is included are the outlines of the design.
I now open photoshop and organise 4 separate layers on my 1080x1080px artboard. The bottom layer is just a solid colour. The next is the shoe’s outlines, then a blank layer named ‘colours’ in which I use the brush tool and finally, the top layer is the shoe outlines once again but this layer has the ‘multiply’ effect selected so that you are able to paint on the outlines and the colours remain hidden behind them. I now use this technique on the remaining sketches and once I have digitally rendered all of my design sketches, I create a new photoshop document where I lay out the designs on artboards which have backgrounds that I had previously created.
To suit mobile devices, I use a 1080x1080 pixel artboard size as this gives me a square image once exported and it looks organised and consistent on an Instagram profile.
Maybe you’re uncertain on how you really want your composition to appear and to that I say that you just have to keep playing around and experimenting on your projects as over time, you’ll pick up on the certain things that you’ve continued doing in your projects and if you collect and compile all of these different and unique features, your style and aesthetic will surely come together so you can use this in your project portfolios. It can also be very useful to explore the layout of other creators’ compositions and portfolios to receive inspiration for designing your own unique creations.
Thank you very much for reading the blog and please feel free to leave any comments and feed back for me to read!
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