Work of art: Footwear is the canvas for these artists
BENGALURU : Vaishak Seraphim is a mechanical engineer by profession but enjoys working on fashion trends and putting a unique spin to shoes. For his record, he has painted Puma shoes for Virat Kohli with his name on it, a pair of shoes worn by Shivani Boruah (fashion blogger) for the Amazon fashion week in Delhi, and most recently, a custom pair of neon Fila shoes. “Since more and more people are becoming open-minded about art on shoes, the ideas for upcoming customs are amazing and I’m sure I’ll have more favourites from those,” said Seraphim.
Nagaraja Gadekal
Taking on the trending culture of customising items, 29-year-old communications graduate Mana Santhanam works as a content creator during the day and moonlights as a custom shoe artist. She has customised a pair of shoes for the Indian rapper Raftaar, with the ‘DragonBall Z’ theme on it.
Mana revisited her passion a few years ago when one of her favourite and oldest pair of shoes needed salvaging. “I did some tweaking and brightening up and didn’t think too much about it at that time. A few years later, the customising streak returned and continued onto a bunch of shoes, T-shirts, and college notebooks. Friends started asking me to customise their stuff too. And with those requests came the realisation that I could do this for more people, anyone who wanted anything customised. And that’s pretty much how it took off.”
Bengaluru-based Mana and Seraphim have painted almost 270 shoes and 600 shoes, respectively, till date. A plethora of options lies ahead of them as they get working on sneakers, trying to reflect their customers’ personality onto them. Chunky designs, fluorescent patterns, Marvel themes, raw pop-art, and even some flower power – these are some of the themes that these custom art creators love to design.
The thing about customised creations is that no two products are ever alike. With all things creative, the only challenge that the artist faces is coming up with new ways of presenting things. “The challenge is to take a repetitive theme that customers ask for and depicting them in different ways. Every time it is different colours, design styles and detailing for my customers, so that the pair they own, or decide to gift, is truly one-of-a-kind.” Mana said. Seraphim added,”Sometimes, it’s the material of the shoe which can pose a challenge (suede is not easy to work with) but most often, it’s the battle for space. There’s a small amount of space to work with and no room for error.”
Both the artists have their own kind of interest. “I have loved painting and colouring stuff ever since I was a child. I would draw cartoons in school on my tees and bedsheets etc., and slowly do it for friends too. I learnt about acrylic paints, fabric paints, glass paints, etc and began experimenting with these media,” Seraphim said.