More shoe detailing! I got art block and suddenly everything was intimidating, so I went back to something calming and relatively easy (since I'm not creating but rather accenting/re-imagining).
These are from Abbey's Skulltimate Secrets doll and I love them a lot but like a lot of MH accessories, a little painting goes a long way. I keep forgetting to take before photos but here's a stock photo for comparison. I painted the eyelets and other hardware silver, highlighted the different panels of the sneakers light blue, and then painted the strip at the front and the icicles white. These shoes are a beautiful subtle iridescent white so even white paint has contrast. You can't see it in these pictures, but the strap that runs under the shoes is painted blue when it obviously shouldn't be because the entire platforms are blue, so I painted that white too. I might go over just the white parts with glossy varnish to make them look more slick, I'll see.
Because I loved the Hissfits so much I got it twice for customizing, I was able to keep one mostly vanilla while transforming the other. The left is close to the "before", except the factory gradient painted right over the chains, so I went over them with gold paint like they're obviously intended to look. Right took a thousands years, but I completely redid it and once again, I think the details stand out a lot better, like the little scratching post heels. Painting all those stripes was long, meticulous work but it was so worth it in the end. That said, the pair on the right arrived somewhat deformed, and if I knew how much work was going to go into painting them, I would have swapped which I used for which, but you can see a little bit of a twist at the top of the left boot from the deformation. I think if I use a clear rubberband to hold it in the right position on a doll for a little while it will sort itself out, but even if I never put these boots on a doll (where it's most apparent), I just like looking at them and I liked doing it.
When I first saw Venus's Garden Mystery heels I didn't think there was much going on with them, and then I saw the sculpt on the designer's profile and realized they had a tiny subway station on the side, and I was obsessed with that idea, so I painted uptown red and downtown green, painted the vine dark green, and added a silver strip for the studded hardware line down the center of the shoe to match the zipper since it's also clearly supposed to be metal.
I'm going to dig around and see what other accessories could use some accenting and see if I can get the creative energy flowing again that way. I complete reorganized and cleaned my workspace which makes it feel better so hopefully that will help too.
