I always wear Allstar shoes. So as part of my visual identity, they are also part of my polymer clay self-portrait sculpture/illustration. Check out also tutorial 1 to see the rest of the process of making minime.

OK then. First I stole a pasta maker from our kitchen, never to be returned. Not everyone in the family was excited, but I was. Then I created thin layers of red clay material and the last round of thinning I passed them through the machine with a piece of cloth with a delicate texture. The texture needs to be very delicate in order to fit the scale of the sculpture.

Now that I have the base material, I created the pattern with paper on top of the sculpture legs. And then gently placed them on the “fabric” material, careful not to ruin the texture I just created.

After having all the pieces for the two shoes (make sure to mirror the patterns for the other shoe) – I placed all of them on a white thinned material, to create the inner part of the allstar shoes.

After having all the pieces with the red fabric outside and the white inside, I placed them on the sculpture legs. Find the mistake in the image.

So mistakes did happen and I did some double work.

With a long white snake part I went around the shoe to create the sole, squeezing it towards the shoe with one of my favorite tools.

On the front part of the Allstar sole there is a thicker part, with some texture. Here I use a needle tool to create the texture. I also add the famous round logo without the logo (just white circle).

Created little equal size balls for the rivets, and then place them. I’m creating a small cavity for each one a ball embossing tool.

Then placing the laces.

At the end, as you can see the final result. I also placed some black acrylic paint to give them a used look. Using a black pen I added the line copying the original Allstar design. The line is not perfect, but in the final image of the self portrait, it’s so small, that you can hardly notice.

Tags: 3d illustration, how to, illustration, polymer clay, polymer clay project, Sculpture, tutorial

This entry was posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2010 at 10:52 am and is filed under Sculpture, The Blog, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.