After getting the paints, you will need to buy some acetone, cotton balls and q-tips. Before doing any painting, you must first use acetone to remove the factory clear coat from the leather. It takes about ten minutes per shoe, wastes about fifty cotton balls, and ten q-tips. This is important because it will help the paint adhere to leather properly and it will protect your work while wearing them. In stress point areas, near the front of the shoe, its also a good idea to lightly sand the area to make sure there is no cracking later on during use. I like to paint on neutral colored sneakers, although black isn't optimal, because the paint will only need a few coats and the acetone will not smear the factory colors. Smearing colors could potentially contaminate intentionally unpainted portions of the shoe because it is very hard to be precise with cotton balls. After you have finished painting, you must clear coat your work several times to protect it from cracking, dirt, cleaning, etc which can also be found on the website above. They have mat and glossy so I had to buy both!!

So here we go! This post contains some old images of a pair of sneakers I painted for my buddy Mike that I thought deserved some attention. The sneakers were originally made by Globe and the shoe design is called "The Don." Now they are called 'The Dan.' I may also have a few pictures of other sneakers I painted on my hard drive, so if that's the case I'll post those too.

This was the very first pair of sneakers I painted. They were an old, worn out pair of all white Nike Air Force Ones that I transformed into a NEW and SUPER CLEAN pair of kicks as you can see by the soles.