How to Draw a Shoe

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Jay French from Jay French Studios dot com. And I'm going to teach you how to draw a shoe. Not a lot of people ask how to do this because well shoes are complicated. They're an combination of elements of textures and fabrics. Let's get our basic foot wedge here. Just so, we're going to draw it around the foot. OK. Here's your foot outline. Very light. And we're going to do a tennis shoe here. Generally, you've got to think of how thick they are. You have a sharp edge at the bottom. You're going to follow the line from this angle, you will see the line following the indent of the arch. Again, you have sharpness here, less detail at the toe end. Generally, you have a roundness to the front of most tennis shoes, sneakers and that sort of thing. But almost all must indent inward at that point. Slope up. OK. Now here's where you get into some nice shortcuts. Before we get into the details of the tongue, that's the complicated part. Get the sole. Again, depending on the type of shoe, depends on how thick that is. You'll also have some sort of trim at the top here. Now a good thing to do is now that you've got this general placement. Get your knot in first. This is part of the reason that any type of tennis shoe or sneaker is so complicated. And you can see you're still going to have to do some erasing. The quickest way to do laces and it's not as realistic, but it gives the impression, is to just do some overlapping X's such as this. And you're really not even going to detail the places in between. Just sort of some curvy negative space X's. You can darken in the areas in between if you feel the need to for a little even more realism. And then your tongue stick, of the shoe sticks out here. Get some shadow from there. Now, something that every tennis shoe, sneaker and so forth always has, is an area of trim around the laces. So get that. And get the area that is of different color on the heel. You can even add some stitching if you want. Again, a little more realism, the toe often an odd shape. Different brands of shoes have different shapes that go there. And then there's usually some type of other pieces of leather. One or two stripes. Or all different shapes, again, depending on the brand. Add some layer, some some depth to these. Because they're actually leather on top of the canvas or fabric of the main part of the shoe. This is usually in color. Cross hatching works good for this, because it's that type of canvas material. It gives that impression. Don't forget them on this side. And that's your basic lesson in how to draw a shoe."