Cambridge artist steps into funky footwear venture
Shoe art opens up new career
CAMBRIDGE — Tammi Nelles had a zombie problem.
A couple of Christmases ago, her daughter Ava wanted some “Walking Dead” shoes. Nelles racked her brains for days.
Mom moaned through the mall. She wandered the online countryside.
“Couldn’t find anything,” recalled Nelles, now two years deep into the specialty shoepainting business she runs — tiny brushes and canvas sneakers stacked high — out of her east Galt dining room.
“My daughter asked for something that did not exist.”
So Nelles grabbed an old pair of Converses and brushed on some undead acrylic scenery. The blood drained from her 12-year-old’s face as she stepped into her very own “walkers” walking shoes.
“She loved them,” Nelles said.
That was the beginning for mom’s career as a shoe artist for social media hire, schooled by a few Google searches into the high-topped world of hand-painted footwear.
“I never painted,” said the one-time insurance industry worker with a once-latent artsy streak. “I never did any of this kind of thing.”
But Nelles posted a photo of those resurrected zombie runners for Ava and started her own Facebook page. Followers went from zero to 150 in a day. Now she’s up to about 2,500.
And the shoe orders? Nelles, who runs a daycare out of her home, figures she’s hand-painted 100 pairs by now. She calls her business Funky Feet Creations.
“I’ve done pretty much everything from Disney to “The Exorcist” and everything that falls in between,” said Nelles, 50.
One woman commissioned Nelles to paint a portrait of her late English bulldog on her soon-to-be-worn wedding shoes.
An eight-year-old girl, just weeks ago, wore the Justin Bieber shoes Nelles painted for her while taking a Stratford tour of Bieber’s favourite haunts. When a shaggy-haired Bieber showed up at the eatery, he posed for a selfie with the girl in the Nikes and complimented her on the snazzy footwear.
Nelles, a spirited Halloween enthusiast, has also done retro TV show shoe work, hearkening back to “The Addams Family” and “The Munsters.” Each pair, done with specialty paint from California, takes 10 to 14 hours to make. The price can start at $70; it depends if you supply shoes, if they’re for kids or adults and the design difficulty. It all factors in. An Eminem motif is next on her rap sheet.
Painted high heels, she noted, are becoming fashionable, too.
“It’s a big craze right now,” she said. “A lot of brides are having their shoes painted and customized. That’s what I’ll be doing.”
Of course, Nelles has her own painted sneakers. One features a maniacal movie clown. The other shows an old-school Harley Quinn villain.
“I was always the student who did well in art,” she said. “I always added a twist to it. Always. I never just followed the line. I always did something slightly different.”