Back in elementary and middle school, students used to whip out a black sharpie and doodle all over their faded-white tennis shoes because their blank-canvas shoes did not quite fit their personalities.

Now, in high school, five students who are in Art 4 or an independent study are reliving their childhood memories as they create their own shoe designs, whether they be wearable or unwearable, for Vans Custom Culture shoe design contest.

The contest is a high school-level, national competition in which each school receives blank Vans shoes, and students design them based on four different themes.

“It may take like 10 classes, or it may take 30 hours of work,” art teacher Jay Langone said. “ They have to do each one of the categories.”

The categories define the overall concept of the shoe design. According to Vans Custom Culture, the categories are art, music, local flavor and action sports. According to Langone, action sports includes extreme sports with board or a bike, such as skateboarding or snowboarding, and local flavor is anything that relates to the culture of where you live.

“We talked about in Michigan what would be specific to our area or our state,” Langone said. “Kids are designing what represents that.”

In the end of February, the four pairs of blank white Vans arrived, and the students got started on working on their design ideas.

According to Vans, once the designs are completed, each pair of shoes from every school goes through a voting process to narrow it down to the top 50 entries. From there, it is up to peers and the schools to accumulate votes from the public to choose the top five that compete in the final event.

Those who make it to the top five are flown out to Los Angeles, California to celebrate their creativity with their art, and the judges vote on the grand prize-winning submission, the winning school receiving $50,000.

Seniors Mackenzie Goss and Devin Lemble are working together on a pair of shoes for the music theme. Both artists have their own styles of art, Goss having a more realistic-cartoon style and is incorporating things such as instruments onto her shoe, and Lemble having more of a graffiti style shoe with bubble letters.

According to Goss, if the prize was won, the school would use the money to attain more art supplies, and she thinks it would open students’ eyes to an artistic career.

“There’s a lot of things you can do with art,” Goss said. “If we had that money to buy supplies, maybe more kids would be interested.”