8th Grade Shoe Drawings

Kids love shoes.. right? Lately it seems that no matter what I do, I can't motivate my 8th grade students. Granted, half of them are only in there because they didn't turn in their elective choices and they just got "stuck" in there, but I really do try to pique their interests, maybe even more so than my students who chose to be there. 

In the past, I used to do shoe drawings with 8th grade, teaching them value and shading. It's usually pretty labor intensive.. .so this time around I decided to try something different. 

Day one we viewed the Netflix video about Tinker Hatfield (Nike Shoe designer, designed most of the Jordans)  on the Abstract series for Netflix. Our school doesnt have a Netflix account, I just logged into my personal account and played it from there. 
***word to the wise, the part where he is talking about the Jordan 20, there is a wall of shoes behind him, he does say "Holy Shit" but ive watched it with both 8th grade classes and they didn't skip a beat***

After that, I tell them there are several ways to customize a shoe design for themselves. They can: 

A: go to Nike.com, or Adidas.com, or Vans.com or any other website that has the ability to customize a shoe, customize one, then I will print it for them to draw.
B: find a picture of a shoe on google that they like, and want to just look at the shoe to draw its form and then customize it. 
C: design and customize a shoe from scratch. Many chose option A.

We discussed drawing from observation, and paying attention to details while drawing their shoe. They chose their own medium from the choice of paint, marker or colored pencil. The shoes were drawn on 8.5x11 printer paper cut out and glued to construction paper. 

Enjoy our shoes!

My personal favorite is the Nike Air Croc...