It is a sunny summer day. Ruby Taylor and her friend Loey Jones-Perpich, both juniors at Community High School, are sitting on Taylor’s back porch with buckets of paint perched by their feet. The girls are painting Taylor’s old Vans hi-tops; what used to be a pair of beat-up white sneakers will soon be covered with flowers and rainbows.

Every five minutes, Taylor’s phone alarm goes off and she runs inside to check if her dog is still sleeping. In the meantime, Taylor and Jones-Perpich play music and relax under the sun’s rays.

Taylor had owned the shoes for three years before deciding that they needed to be jazzed up. She did not like the dirty off-white aesthetic yet was not in favor of getting rid of her shoes. So, with some of the paint lying around in her house, Taylor and Jones-Perpich went to work.

“We both did a different shoe,” Taylor said. “Originally, we were going to do the same thing...I wanted to do a weather theme and she was thinking more fun flowers. We kind of matched up [the colors] since we had the same paint.”

Her top and pants are both from Salvation Army, one of Taylor’s go-to shopping destinations. Taylor spotlights her shoes by avoiding patterns elsewhere in her outfit and wearing colors that match the paint on her shoes.