Paper Shoes

I just realized I never wrote a post about the paper shoes I made for my summer art AD106 class. They didn't turn out how I had originally planned but I liked them a lot and I got a 100% on the project.

The project requirements were that the pair of shoes (yes 2 shoes) had to be created solely from paper and cardboard, no fabric materials at all. They needed to have a minimum of a 2 inch heel/lift/platform and you needed to be able to walk in them for 60ft+. While 60ft was the minimum you needed 80ft to get full credit and any foot after 80ft was extra credit, but you could only get a 100% on the project no matter how many feet you walked. 

Another requirement was that the shoes designed needed to have a minimum of 3 colors. Originally I was very certain I wanted my shoes to be red, black, and white. Just like most of my designs usually are those three colors. However, when I went to the store the prices and selection provided weren't great at all and I ended up choosing a black sparkly glitter paper and then blue and silver hologram type paper. 


I made the first heel as sort of my prototype for what I wanted the structure to look like and went from there. One idea I decided on was making the heels have a strap like a pair of sandals. I was going to have some ankle strap be decided against it because I thought it wouldn't help me with the walking. Then I played around with the idea of spikes or flower petal like cardboard pieces around the ankle. However, with the paper choices I made those didn't look too great. Finally I liked the idea of having little triangles connecting the platform to the heel. I thought it would help me with stability. 

 The picture to the right is my final design. It's not the best craftsmanship but I was the only person to do high heels this way (not just a platform lift the whole foot length/size) and I was the only person to really take a risk creation wise. The colors looked pretty stellar too actually. I called them my galaxy heels. For the walking test I got maybe 10ft and the heels were breaking. I essentially slid my way all the way down to maximum extra credit on floating heels because my platforms were so strong. Essentially the triangles needed to be way more stable and I probably shouldn't have walked around in them so much immediately after finishing make them because I might have worn them down a little too much. Overall it was a great project and I'm really happy I went with my idea to do high heels even though it was difficult. I love projects like this and I think it just backed up my idea that I'd love to make shoes at some point in my career. Plus, it was just a lot of fun to work on over the summer!