How to Create Awesome Multicolor Sneakers
Have you seen those rainbow color sneakers and wondered how you can achieve the same look yourself?
Today, I am going to show you how to make your own multicolor sneakers using an airbrush. Airbrushing is a fun and straightforward way to upcycle shoes and create amazing custom designs without spending a fortune. I am really excited to show you how I achieved this look, so let’s get started.
Tools and materials:
- White sneakers
- Shoe cleaner
- Paper
- Masking tape
- Pencil
- Cloth
- Airbrush
- Acrylic leather paint
- Thinning medium
- Acrylic top coat
To start, we will need 7 colors of acrylic leather paint. I used: fire red, neon lava orange, tropical sunny yellow, neon popsicle green, pale blue, sapphire and grape 5.
This is the airbrush I use.
Make sure you have an airbrush cleaner nearby as the gun will need to be cleaned out while you work.
1. Prep your surface
Use a shoe cleaner to prep the surface and allow a stronger bond between the paint and shoe.
2. Cover areas you do not want painted
One of the most important steps of this custom is to properly tape off your shoe.
Make sure you cover all the areas you do not plan on airbrushing over with masking tape and paper.
When airbrushing, you will get overspray, so any areas that are not covered will most likely end up with paint.
I plan on only airbrushing the midsole, so I also taped over the outer sole.
3. Mark off where each color will go
Before we start spraying, we need to make sure our colors are evenly spread throughout our shoe.
To do this we're going to mark off our seven sections with a pencil ensuring all the colors will fit. Once our paint has been sprayed on our decorated shoes, the pencil marks will be completely covered.
Remember to mark off both sides of the shoe.
4. Start spraying
It’s a good idea to use a thinning medium with the paint so that the mixture runs properly through the airbrush.
Start off by adding your red mixture to the airbrush.
Spray light coats within the boundaries of your outline and dry with a heat gun.
It's totally fine if the color goes a bit over your border as we want each color to blend. Apply 5-6 coats allowing time for each coat to dry.
Next up is our neon orange. It's important to note that the airbrush hasn't been completely cleaned yet this will help the red and orange colors have a better blend.
Make sure your airbrush is held at a distance, so it creates more of a mist.
Yellow should be our next color but we’re going to save it for last. The reason we're doing this is that any other color we spray next to it is going to mist back onto our yellow and ruin our blend. Therefore, it's a lot easier to leave yellow for the end.
With that being said, here's when we need to clean out our airbrush. Since we're going from orange to green and skipping the yellow, we want to make sure the brush is clean, so the green does not have an orange blend.
Wipe out the orange paint from the tank.
And run the airbrush cleaner through the gun.
Repeat the blending technique with the remaining colors to complete the rainbow. The gun won't need to be cleaned in between colors until we go back to yellow.
Tip: Another good technique for blending your colors together is leaving the edges of each color less saturated than the middle.
Now that we're done with the rest of the rainbow, let's go back to yellow. It's important to make sure your gun is cleaned before pouring in your yellow paint.
Go ahead and spray multiple coats of yellow between the orange and green to finish off the fade.
Repeat the above steps on the other side of your shoe.
5. Remove the paper and tape to reveal your multicolored sneakers
6. Apply a finisher to seal off the paint
Multicolor sneakers
Now it’s time to enjoy your hard work and show off your multicolored sneakers!
This fading technique is so simple and creates such an amazing effect. Let me know what you think of these rainbow shoes in the comments. See you next time!
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