Thor/Loki Shoes

In celebration of going to see Thor: The Dark World yesterday, I painted my shoes once again! This time, I required a bit of research beforehand. Without further ado, the shoes!

 This isn't actually the final product... I actually added in THOR and LOKI on each shoe, but this is a pretty good representation. I'll update later.

 To start this project, I had to paint each shoe with two coats of red/green paint. I decided those were good base colors for Thor and Loki, and since I don't have a favorite of the two of them, I decided to do both.

 This is how it look after two coats. Yes, there are some splotchy bits, but the overall appearance was pretty good.

 I painted Thor's Norse symbol, and Loki's name in Norse runes. This is part of the research I was referring to- Norse runes have debatable sounds and meanings, but this was the best translation I could find. Unfortunately, of the two, only Thor had an actual symbol associated with him.

 At this point, I decided that my painting skills were good enough to paint silhouettes, but not much better than that, so these were my concept sketches.

 Thor turned out better than I was afraid he might.

 When I actually colored him in, I lengthened his cloak, but otherwise, he was how I wanted him.

Loki, on the other hand... I loved his helmet, but his back looked a bit fat. To combat this, in the final part, I added his scepter from the Avengers, and his name balanced things out pretty well, too.

Ta-daa! ;)

Minion Pumpkin

I know this is a bit late, since Halloween was last week, but I felt like posting this anyway, partly because  love how it turned out.

 Not sure you can entirely see the mouth, and the extra sharpie lines are a bit distracting, but here's my competed minion! I decided this year not to carve completely through the pumpkin at all. Instead, I 'peeled' the skin of the pumpkin away, and then dug it out about halfway through. Took a lot longer than just carving would have, but I like how it turned out better.

 I started with a pumpkin, then I gutted it. This involves cutting out/off the top of the pumpkin, and scooping all of its innards into a bowl, so your pumpkin won't rot as fast. If you're feeling really ambitious, you can bake those seeds into some pretty tasty snacks, but I never do.

 This is the tool I used for most of my 'carving'. It's an 'apple corer', not a potato peeler, but the only part of it I used was the pointy/scoopy end, so if you've got a pointy/scoopy tool, that will work. I understand that flat-head screwdrivers work pretty well, too.

 Next step: draw your picture. This can be as complicated as you want, but the more detail work, the harder it is. I chose a Minion, from Despicable Me, because I am mildly obsessed with them. The next trick is deciding which parts will be carved and which parts will be left in relief.

 I carved like so, generally: I stabbed out the outline of whatever I was carving. If it was a space, like the goggles, hands, feet or overalls, I would then scoop/scrape out the middle part of the area, carefully, so as not to damage the outlines. Remember, color inside the lines! /for lines, like the outline pictured here, I stabbed it, then scraped with the point until I liked how think the line got.

 And this is how it turned out! If you want the lines to glow, you need to carve them a lot farther than you might think.

 Not sure if you could tell, but this is supposed to be a minion super excited about a bunch of bananas.. so I supplied him with some.

 Beyond not glowing super brightly, my camera doesn't do super well with dark images, but this is pretty much what it looked like with a candle inside.

And here are more pictures of how it looks on our porch. It makes me smile every time I pass by it.

And for those of you who were wondering, yes, I do like them that much, as immature and childish as it is, they can always make me laugh.

On Halloween, if you put a bowl of candy in front of him, his face is great. Well, it's great in general, but especially if he has something to look at.