Custom AF1 Sketch, a Shoe Treated as a Page

A sketch pair is the design people assume needs the least planning and actually needs the most, because a page of drawing that looks casual is almost never casual. Marks made genuinely at random distribute evenly, and an even distribution reads as texture rather than as a page. What reads as a sketchbook is uneven: dense in one corner, empty in another, with one element large enough to organise everything around it.

Apollo is built exactly that way. The shoe is white. Behind and around the swoosh sits a fanned burst of fine black lines radiating outward, tight at their origin and opening as they travel, which is the one large element and the thing the eye lands on first. Everything else is small: scattered doodles and marks in black, and single touches of red, yellow, blue and green across the toe and the mudguard, at the scale somebody would make in a margin. Black brush lettering sits on the heel. The toe box is left almost empty.

The fan is the technically demanding part and it is a good illustration of why line work is slow. Every line in it is drawn in one pass with a liner brush, from the tight end outward, and the lines have to stay parallel as they open, which means the spacing between them widens continuously along their length. Drawn at a constant gap they bunch and the fan flattens. Drawn carelessly, two lines touch and the whole passage reads as a blot, and there is no correcting a black line on white leather.

The small marks are placed rather than sprinkled. Each one sits where it does because of what is next to it: a red tick beside a black doodle, a blue mark holding a gap open, a stretch of leather deliberately left with nothing on it. The empty passages are as considered as the drawn ones, and they are the reason the shoe reads as a page somebody worked on rather than as a pattern somebody applied.

Autokicks M2 is the sibling pair and it came from a real brief rather than an idea: a driver commissioned it, and it came back as a sketchbook. Quick studies and fine linework gather across white leather, with a fan of drafting lines opening behind the swoosh like a rev counter climbing. Same language, different subject matter, which is exactly the point of this direction. The sketch register can carry anybody's preoccupations.

Ink on leather has one rule that governs the whole job. Fine line work goes down on a prepared and cured surface, never on raw leather, because raw leather wicks and a crisp line spreads into the grain and turns furry within a day. So the base is prepared and cured before any drawing starts, the drawing is laid with a liner brush rather than a pen, and the whole surface is sealed again over the top. The drawing itself is the shortest stage.

For wear this is one of the most forgiving pairs in the catalogue. It is mostly bare white leather with isolated marks on it, so there is no saturated field to scuff, and a scratch lands in a composition that is already full of small marks. If you want a pair with a lot going on that you can wear without watching it degrade, ask for a sketch pair rather than a colour-blocked one.

For a brief, the useful thing is to give the marks a subject. A sketch pair with your own preoccupations in it, the tools of your trade, the things you doodle in the margins of your own notebooks, is a genuinely personal object. A sketch pair with generic doodles on it is decoration. Send us a photograph of a page you actually filled and we will work from that.

Send us your own margins. That is the whole brief.