Air Max 90 "Zebra Apocalypse"

There's an interesting story behind this shoe (which originally was unplanned):

Recently a customer contacted me about wanting some air max 90s customized with an animal pattern.  The young lady wanted a shoe with an animal pattern (which ended up being zebra) and the colors pink, green, purple, blue, and black.  So after exchanging an email or two I drew up a rough sketch of the shoe:

Again, this is just a rough sketch to give her an idea of how the shoe would look.  Well, to make a long story short, after 2-3 more email exchanges the would-be customer unfortunately ended up backing out of ordering the design.  However, I liked the shoe idea and thought it was too good to pass up on.  So the next day I drew up another sketch.  The next one was similar to the one above except I changed up the color scheme and cut it from 5 colors down to 3.  I also added a little detail to the center portion of the midsole.  The end result was this:

Thus came the shoes I call "Zebra Apocalypse".  The name is obviously a play on all the talk/running jokes of a zombie apocalypse (usually related to the talk of the bath salts incidents).  I figured since the shoes feature a zebra pattern i'd just replace zombie with zebra.

Originally I was planning to take a short break from coming up with new designs for the Air Max 90 shoes but this situation inspired me to go forward with this design.  It's funny sometimes where inspiration comes from.

There's a saying that goes "Rejection doesn't mean you aren't good enough.  It means the other person failed to notice what you have to offer" and that's kind of how I felt about this project.  I remember telling a good friend, who's also a fellow artist, about when I thought about doing this project after the person backed out and he said "Your art, your ideas, your rewards.  Flakers miss out on original art they won't get anywhere else". So now everyone not only gets to see an original piece of art that was passed up on by someone else, but they get to own it themselves!  This shoe is actually available for all to order in both mens & womens sizes at the link below:

"Zebra Apocalypse" Air Max 90

http://ecentrik.bigcartel.com/product/zebra-apocalypse-custom-air-max-90