Shoe Cel Shading Looks Like Magic

Jennifer, a.k.a. Goldvester Cosplay, is a master at cel shading fabric and skin. She cosplayed as Mad Moxxi from Borderlands and made the character look like a walking cartoon — which is a compliment. She completely captured the look of Moxxi’s boots, and she documented the steps she used to cel shade them. It’s a handy guide for shoes, yes, but also cel shading in general. The above shoes started as brown boots.

For the first step, she removed the straps from the boots and rubbed 100% acetone nail polish remover over the boots’ surfaces to help the paint stick. Next she painted the base colors on. She says:

I used Tulip ‘soft’ fabric paint for these, I used them for my first Maya boots and it held up well for over 10 conventions! Any regular fabric paint should do (just not any of the textured/’puffy’ paint!). It took 2-3 layers of white paint and 1-2 layers of black paint. You might need more layers of white paint depending on your fabric paint, just keep adding layers until you’re happy with it!

Then the shading begins with a really light touch of different colors of paint and very careful blending.

This is what the boots looked like before the paint:

Then with the first pass of white and black paint:

View the complete transformation and get how-to details in this album at Facebook.