I have been drawing all of my sons shoes since he started wearing shoes, and I have been drawing them in two little books, one of them was a tiny Moleskine Cahier in which I drew entirely in black pen, no colour, and then when that was finished I started Volume 2, in a ‘Handmade’ brand square sketchbook in which I started adding some colour to the drawings. As the shoes have grown in size, the drawings have become smaller as I have tried to fit them onto the small square page. Now I have finally started to just let them cross over onto the other page, so I can draw them longer. The lad’s feet are only getting bigger. The shoes above are his latest soccer cleats (football boots), fairly lightweight Nike shoes, not like the sort of thing you’d get in my day. He plays soccer a lot better than I did in my day though. He’s been injured for a lot of the past six months, so has not had as much opportunity to play, but we got these a few months ago as his feet are of course growing. He’s at the age now where growth will come rapidly; when I was his age I did all of my growing all at once, and I’m not much taller now then when I was 13. (Although my shoe size has gone up in the past couple of years, for some reason, I didn’t know that was a thing but it is). Watching him grow up, especially during this pandemic year, definitely emotional for me as a parent, and especially looking back at the growing shoes over all these years. You spend a lot of your life in your shoes, they literally take the weight of your world.

These three I have drawn recently are quite functional in nature. The blue and white Nike shoe is for soccer; this next one, the very comfortable looking Merrell shoe, that one is for hiking. We recently went on a hiking trip to Utah, and we plan to do more hiking in the future, so we all got hiking shoes / boots at REI before the trip. These were the ones we got for my son, though I don’t think we got these at REI but they were bought online with many others that got returned until we found the right ones. Shoes are annoying like that. When I got mine I tried them on, yep these are nice, I’ll take them. It’s because I hate trying on shoes. When I was his age, my mum would take me to so many shoe shops and make me try on so many shoes and I hated, it wasn’t like traumatic or anything, I just really disliked the whole trying on shoes process, and the smell of shoe shops, I just wanted in and out as soon as possible. I’m still the same. These days ordering shoes online is harder because you have to order several to see which ones fit ok, they are all a bit different, and you have to send them back. Still it’s good to get the right ones. Hiking boots / shoes are really padded and comfortable, and I love the design of these ones. Hopefully we get a lot more hiking in before these ones are outgrown.

And finally, these are his New Balance running shoes. I got running shoes myself a few months ago and definitely notice the difference than what I was running in before (though I’ve not run much in the past month, whoops). Unfortunately due to an ongoing injury he’s not been able to run much since we got them, but they are so comfy he wears them as his regular shoes and they are at least nice to walk in. They look cool as well. That’s a very curved heel, that gives a lot of support down there. And these are the latest shoes in the series. Them feet are growing fast…