The Origin of KicksArt
Growing up, I was known as the kid who was good at drawing. I would draw a lot of what influenced or inspired me: anime, graffiti, patterns, 3-dimensional shapes, that “S” thing. It wasn’t until freshman year of high school that I would draw my first sneaker.
In health class, we were assigned a project to design a shoe for a sport of our choosing. The catch was that our design needed to benefit the athletes of the sport in an innovative way (such as extra lockdown or cushion). I couldn’t tell you the feature that was added to my design, but what I can say is working on that first drawing changed the way my mind looked at footwear forever.
I drew that initial design at least 20 times over, slowly refining it each time until I felt like it was perfect. My drawings were improving, but I felt like something was missing from them. Being that kid who bought shoes from Walmart, I didn’t know what good footwear design looked like. Knowing Jordan’s were popular, I started to do research and soon turned into a sneakerhead. Printing out all the coloring pages I could find to experiment with new colorways on my favorite models.
Having minor OCD(self-diagnosed), I wanted all the coloring pages to have a clean/consistent style, which wasn’t the case with what was available at the time. You would have to search through multiple sites to find what you wanted. However, if the pages weren’t Nike’s or Jordan’s, no one bothered to make them.
-OPPORTUNITY–
KicksArt started in 2014 as a Youtube channel. Today, it’s become the brand I would’ve wanted to know about back when I first fell in love with drawing sneakers. So, in a sense, you could say I made this all for myself.