DIY Sharpie Tie Dye Shoes - Fun Loving Families

If you’ve ever wondered how to dye shoes, we’ve got a great project for you that involves drawing on shoes with sharpies. In this DIY Sharpie tie dye shoes tutorial, we experimented with lots of designs so you can get some inspiration for your own sharpie shoes.

We had so much fun making these shoes.

The girls and I sat outside at the picnic table, and spent a couple of hours creating our shoe designs, and we absolutely love how our shoes came out.

The process can take as much or as little time as you would like…it all just depends on how intricate you want your designs to be. I have some tips and design ideas after the instructions below.

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How to Make Sharpie Tie Dye Shoes

Ready to get started?

One of the things that’s great about this project is it’s pretty low-cost if you can find a cheap pair of white canvas sneakers. We found ours on sale at Michaels for $6 (sometimes they’re even cheaper!).

Here’s what you’ll need:

Colorful set of Sharpie markers
plain white canvas shoes
rubbing alcohol
spray bottle
masking tape

supplies for dying shoes with sharpie: white shoes, rubbing alcohol, sharpie markers

cover the rubber sole of your shoe with masking tape to keep the colors from running onto it (we didn’t do this!)
use the Sharpie markers to color your design on your shoes
use spray bottle with rubbing alcohol to make the colors run all over the shoe
allow to dry
repeat if necessary, until you’re happy with the results

steps for dyeing shoes with Sharpie marker

Sharpie Shoe Designs

We looked at a lot of tutorials and images and ended up playing around and experimenting with different designs. Here are some tips for achieving different results.

For Galaxy Shoes

Use black, dark blues and turquoise, purple, and pink. Use the black in splotches, and leave some white space between colors.

When your shoes are dry, add some stars with white paint, glitter glue, or rhinestones for added sparkle.

Striped Sharpie Shoes, 2 Ways

For basic stripes – Choose the colors you’d like, then create colored lines separating the stripes. Using bold, bright colors works better than lighter pastels. I first made mine with pastels, but the color ended up having more of a washed-out/faded look.

As you can see in the upper image directly below, the color runs down and creates a fade from dark to light on the side of the shoe.

Splotchy stripes – For these shoes, I still created subtle vertical lines around the shoe so that I would know where I wanted my stripes to go. Then, I filled in each area with dark splotches. In the image directly above, you can see where the colors ran from the dark splotches into the white space around it.

For Spiral Tye Die Shoes

Start by making guidelines for your spirals.

shoes with spiral sharpie marker designs

Then color in over the stripes, leaving some white space between colors. I actually had my colors pretty close. Overall, I’m really happy with how it turned out, but I think next time I’m going to leave a little more white space in between colors.

Here is the shoe above, after I sprayed it with the rubbing alcohol.

finished DIY spiral tie-dye designed shoe

How Long Does it Take To Make the Sharpie Designs?

Obviously, the more elaborate you want your design to be, the more time it will take.

The first pair that I made, I went with a simple striped theme and it went really fast. The next pair I made, I chose the spiral design, and that definitely took a little more time and patience. It can go as quickly as 20-30 minutes, to a couple hours, from the time you start drawing on your shoes to when you’re done spraying them.

Once you’re happy with how they look, they’ll need time to dry. The recommended time is 24 hours, but ours were dry much faster than that.

Don’t forget to Pin and save this idea.