Art of Custom Sneakers is a cool tutorial and technique guide for painting custom shoes/sneakers by Xavier Kickz. Released 12th Sept 2023 by Quarto on their Rockport imprint, it's 160 pages and is available in paperback and ebook formats.

The author has a popular youtube channel and writes with a very easygoing and encouraging voice. The tutorials are fun, mostly easy to follow (some are more advanced), and full of bright catchy colors. The book, in its entirety is line drawn with color illustrations, but no photography. There are QR links throughout which lead readers to fully filmed tutorial and related technique videos.

This would be an excellent choice for public or school library acquisition, home use, or gift giving. For readers who also enjoy thrifting and upcycling, this book is a treasure chest *full* of excellent tutorials for upcycling and recycling otherwise unused shoes (and potentially other items like canvas or leather bags and backpacks).

Four and a half stars. Dinged a bit for not having any photos included, but thematically it works and the QR links are only slightly awkward (it was clearly an intentional editorial decision on the part of the author/publisher).

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book is around 3.5 stars for me. This is a cute book! It's written as a guide to decorate shoes in various ways. The book gives instructions, but no examples or pictures so if you're a visual learner it may be hard. Some of the instructions are also fairly high-level and just a couple of pages long, so if you're new it may take some additional learning. I would have liked some more information for beginners and pictures instead of drawings, but it's a good book for inspiration and ideas of ways to customize shoes.

This is an amazing and creative guide to the history of sneakers and how customization has become a popular trend. It details the different techniques and paints that can be used to create custom sneakers. I enjoyed the timelines and the bits of history included in the book. The illustrations were great as well.

I was really disappointed with this book. While it does showcase many different techniques to customize sneakers, due to everything being illustrated, I found it lacking. It would have been much more helpful to have actual pictures of the steps in the process instead of illustrations for an art/project book like this.

Our foot wardrobe these days, consists of a number of sneaks, used for every day wear and just to kicking back. This does not mean that our footwear need to be boring. This book provided lots of information, ideas and designs to uplift the dull, plain sneaker - sneakers which will be admired and talked about -which leaves only the reader to say "I designed them myself."
Great designs for all the family, easy to follow instruction and inexpensive makes. Love the book'
Thanks you NetGalley and the publishers for the DRC