If you have read some of my previous posts, you would know that I tried spray painting a galaxy design on shoes and it failed so hard. So don’t listen to me and check out these amazing galaxy shoes tutorials which I’m just in awe of! These are the best 3 techniques for painting galaxy shoes in my opinion!
Watercolour Galaxy
I just love how the watercolour paints blend together to give such a soft, dreamy galaxy! My favourite watercolour paint is definitely Winsor & Newton Cotman Water Colour Paint. It’s so affordable and yet remarkably high quality. And it has more than 6000 ratings on Amazon! Yes, I’m a fan!
Here are the main tips that I picked up from this tutorial:
With watercolour paint on fabric, be generous with water. The more, the merrier.
Painting dots on the wet fabric will give it a halo effect! You don’t even need any fancy techniques, the water will do it for you!
Peel-Tek masking fluid. I have no idea what this is until this tutorial and WHERE HAS IT BEEN ALL MY LIFE! I was always struggling with preventing the paint from bleeding to other parts of the shoes. Apparently that’s the EXACT purpose of this fluid!
First, you have to dilute the fluid slightly with a few drops of water until it is viscous enough to be painted with.
Paint the parts of your shoes where you don’t want the galaxy paint on such as the eyelets and rubber soles.
After you finish painting the shoes, you can actually PEEL off this fluid after it has dried. I guess that’s why its called Peel-Tek lol. What a neat trick!
Tie-Dye Galaxy
I have always loved tie-dye designs, but I didn’t know you can use it for a galaxy design! One thing to note for tie-dye is: initial colour while wet ≠ finished colour when dry. Tie-dye is good if you are looking for a ‘washed-out’ effect.
Now I’ve never experimented with tie-dye before, so I learned quite a lot from this tutorial. Maybe I will experiment with it in my future DIY crafts! Here are some key tips I picked up from it:
Similar to the watercolour, you need to wet the canvas shoes before painting it.
Let the colours bleed into each other but use black carefully. We don’t want to overwhelm the shoes with black.
The drying method is so interesting to me! You are to wrap the shoes in a grocery bag and let it sit in the sun for 6-8 hours.
Rinse the shoes until no more colour is coming off from it and throw it into the washing machine for 1 wash cycle.
Before 
After
Look at that colour difference before and after it fades. I’m an extra AF girl, so I actually prefer the ‘Before’ colours. I wonder if there’s any way to prevent it from fading. But the faded colours actually do make for a good background for a galaxy. It’s all up to one’s preferences!
A good starter kit for tie-dye designs would be Tulip One-Step Tie-Dye Kit. If it doesn’t ship to your country, another good alternative is Vanstek Tie Dye DIY Kit!
Fabric Galaxy – Tried & Tested!
The standard technique to paint a galaxy on canvas shoes is definitely by using textile/fabric paints. This is my favourite way to paint fabric as the results are predictable, similar to painting on paper. I have used this to paint my canvas shoes, from zombie feet design to Harry Potter.
As compared to watercolour paints and tie-dyes, fabric paint doesn’t bleed as much. So you need to manually blend the colours together. In that sense, it requires a bit more technical skills but you have greater control over the outcome! I would recommend getting Crafts 4 ALL Fabric Paint if you have the budget. But a cheaper yet good alternative is FolkArt Fabric Paint!
There are so many galaxy shoes tutorials that used fabric paints and everyone has different ways of sealing them. But don’t get confused! Just spray it with a waterproof sealant and we’re good to go.
So these 3 DIY techniques are the best, in my opinion, to paint galaxy shoes. I know there are other techniques such as colouring it with Sharpie markers, but I’m not a big fan of the end results.
What do you guys think? Have you tried any of these techniques before? How did it turn out?
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