As a new set of exercises presented itself to me, I took the opportunity to take a more straightforward approach rather than beat around the bush and make excuses for not creating certain kinds of work. I began by diving into my old “work” i.e., my sketchbook pages. And I found a collection of pages that had some interesting stuff, pages from the subjective and objective drawing exercises, among other things.

I’ll be quite frank, once I laid my eyes on the pages with the shoe drawings, I immediately settled on “shoes” as my subject. Thus authorial practice, of the ones that were provided, that I went with was fashion and accessories, something I have never been certain about. Fashion has always been a very limiting subject in my mind; even in real life, my regular ensemble comprises no more than a very bland t-shirt, a pair of sports shorts and a good pair of shoes (and now even a mask). And particularly shoes of this nature:

At first, you’d think they’d fall into the same category of shoes, ankle-tops, basically, but when I decided to digitally trace them to have something more defined to work with, I found myself with two very different shoes, with completely different contexts and attitudes. In the process of tracing, I had to add some extra elements and remove some, so they may not look exactly the same as the original drawings. And I was a little disappointed I didn’t have more shoes of a similar category to work with, but I had to make do with these. And who doesn’t like a good pair of sports-style ankle-tops?

Next I started working on possible colour combinations. Mostly I wanted to keep the palette monochromatic, tones of one colour in addition to white, black and grey

I created 4 shoes, two of each type. The taller, slimmer ones reflected a a collection of colours I personally liked to see when buying shoes. Aqueous for one, and the popular trio of red, white and black for the other, something I’ve subconsciously appreciated for a very long time but I’m not entirely sure why. In the video games I’ve played, particularly games like Warframe, which is set in a fictional universe where you basically play as a bioengineered humanoid with the mission of protecting the universe.

…and Cyberpunk 2077 where you play as a character who finds themselves deep in the criminal underworld of a futuristic city.

As the name suggests, the genre is cyberpunk, and so are the shoes. A lot of the ideas for the categorisation of the shoes also came from these games as the two designs almost seems to suggest a difference, not only in occupation, but in the social hierarchy.

This shoe seems to be designed for a more technical profession, something a lot more sophisticated, very stylish and slender, not too saturated with a clean finish.

On the other hand, this shoe is a lot more bulky and seems to be designed for a more rough job, almost like something a laborer or a worker would wear.

I thus separated the shoes into two categories: Techpunk (more sophisticated and capable) and Slumdog (more low income and labour intensive), within each of which were two subcategories: Frost and Rebel for Techpunk, suggesting a difference in nature of the designs and colours; Metro and Wilds for Slumdog, suggesting a difference in location.

The last step was giving an overarching name for the line of shoes, which I decided would be “Future Footwear” since it derived a lot of inspiration from the “futurism” sub-genre of science fiction.