Lio's Boot Breakdown! (Patreon)

Lio's shoes


Lio doesn't have much of a heel in the movie, but the majority of fanartists draw him with one because it really is such a look, so I decided to go to goodwill and  find a pair of boots that fit comfortably and had my desired heel shape and size. The boots I bought were actually leather thigh highs that ended up being more of a hassle to prep than I had expected. The leather they had been made out of was extremely cheap and falling apart. Before I could cover the boots in my new fabric, I had to cut them down from thigh highs into booties and sand away all of the cheap flaking leather. If I had tried to glue my new fabric directly over the old, it would have only adhered to the already peeling off layer and would come right off with it.


Once the boots were cut and sanded, I decided to paint the underside of the heel before covering the shoe to avoid accidental paint mess on the new fabric. I used iridescent color shifting paint that I plan to use throughout the entire costume to replicate the pink reflected light coming from Lio's right and teal reflected light coming from Lio's left in the movie, figure, and promotional art. It took about a million layers and a few hours with a blow dryer, but I'm happy with how the bottoms look. Obviously, the part that I'll be walking on will wear off pretty quickly, but it looked better to paint it and have it get a little faded than to have the color abruptly stop.


To cover the boots in the black holographic fabric, I used the same dry-adhere method with contact cement that I used for just about anything. The boots already had seams in them from where the original leather was sewn, so I covered each of those sections with painter's tape and pulled it off to create patterns for the pieces of the new fabric I would be gluing on. I glued the pieces on one section at a time, covering the section and its respective new fabric piece in contact cement and letting them both dry completely before pressing them together. The contact cement takes about 20-30 minutes to dry, so this process can take quite a long time if you're not efficient about it. The fabric pieces tend to curl once covered in the contact cement, so make sure you have little weights to hold down the edges so that they don't fold into themselves and stick or get glue on the front. This is probably the biggest pain of this process and why I can only do one or two pieces at a time. It's a big bother to keep track of a million little object weighing down the sides of a bunch of pieces that can't be accidently knocked over or moved so I usually only have two pieces drying at a time. 


Once the large pieces of the shoe were covered, I used fabric tack to glue on pieces covering the little details like the raw edges at the top and the zippers. 


The belts on the shoes are pieces of 2mm craft foam also covered in the same holographic black fabric with contact cement then glued on with black e6000. I realized that the belts kinda disappeared against the black fabric so to make them stand out more, I painted the edges with pink and teal. I wasn't happy with how sloppy the lines looked so after some brainstorming, I decided to buy some permanent stick on vinyl in glossy white that I painted a gradient onto and cut into tiny strips to stick on the edges over the Shakey paint job. I'm really happy with how this looks and I'll be using it for the rest of the belts on Lio. For stationary belts like the ones on Lio's shoes, the vinyl sticks well enough on its own, but for the belts that will be actual functioning belts that buckle, I'll be using black e6000 to glue on the strips of vinyl so that they don't peak off.


The small buckets were rather hard to find. I searched every craft store, both in store and online, Amazon, Etsy, and even Walmart and goodwill to find shoes or a bag with buckles I could harvest. Eventually, I found a pair of strappy heels at Goodwill that had 6 one inch middle bar buckles the size I needed but they were gold so I bought the shoes, cut the buckles off, painted them with nyx silver nail polish, and then painted teal and pink gradients into them.


I think that just about covers everything I did for Lio's booties but if you have any questions, please ask away in the comments!