Customer Spotlight: Air Jordan 1 "Digi Camo" Custom

Recently a customer contacted me asking if I could do a rendition of the Air Jordan 1 Digi Camo shoe.  The Digi Camo (or Digital Camouflage) Jordans were an actual shoe made by Nike/Jordan Brand that as of right now has never been released (there was only a sample shoe made which had a few pics floating over the internet).  I thought it was an interesting project and decided to take it on.

First I wanted to find pics of the original shoes to use for reference.  Now as I mentioned, there were only a few pics of the original shoe on the net.  Unfortunately the pics weren't the best quality but I decided I would try to work with them as best I could.  So here's pics of the originals followed by my custom made version:

Original Pics (pics courtesy of Kicks On Fire):

And here's the custom painted version:

The camo pattern was very challenging..even more so than elephant print.  I had to special mix some paint colors to get that similar beige-like color base for most of the shoe (most of my paints are special mixes anyway...I rarely use paints straight out the bottle except with a few colors).  And the laces were pretty tricky to find for a while but managed to find something similar to the ones on the originals.  Overall I was pleased with the finished product (as was the customer when he saw them which was most important) and it was a fun project.