Blue Flash

oil on card 23x17cm

Painted over last Thursday and Friday, and the grey background consolidated on Monday morning.

One of my plimsolls, a Dunlop Blue Flash, has been worn so long that it has come apart at the outside edge. This has revealed a pink plastic construction strip, which looks a bit like the gums in a cat or dog’s mouth. I like the difference between the clean fresh gum, the dense blue of the inside, and the dry, worn textures of the rest of the shoe.

This has turned out well, but on the first day, I got too zoned in on the laces, and when Madam saw it she thought it looked like a kid’s shoe. Solved it the next morning when I woke up and realised that I’d had a shift in scale between the eyelets and the rest of it, a bad thing. Children’s shoes use standard eyelets, and appear much larger, so I had to overpaint my (devastatingly-good-but-no-one–will-ever-know) rendering of giant eyelets. Serves me right for not concentrating.

I would like to point out that I have much better shoes to wear than this.