“I didn’t really know how (to paint them), but I experimented and it took off from there,” he said.

Coduti’s work has been featured in Anorak Magazine and The Offbeat, and his paintings have been displayed in Gallery 4N5 in San Francisco. Now, with a briefcase reading “I paint shoes” in hand, Coduti takes requests for painted shoes and sells them.

“The shoes are probably my favorite medium,” he said. “I do a wide range, but those are my favorite because people are actually interacting with them on a daily basis and everyone is going to have a different experience with them.”

The process of painting a design on a pair of white canvas shoes takes about eight hours, Coduti said. His work is so popular that he is not taking orders until 2013.

“Usually I go through with black paint and outline the designs, and then I’ll go through and do the color portions of it,” Coduti said. “I have it down to almost a science.”

Coduti’s mother, DeWitt, Mich., resident Wendy Coduti, said Cale’s love for art dates back to childhood.

“He’s always been drawing or painting ever since he was little,” Wendy Coduti said. “But it really wasn’t until a few years ago where he started taking photographs and started painting shoes, and then he really just took off.”

Cale Coduti now paints shoes in his dorm room. RCAH Recruitment Coordinator Lizzy Thornton, who met him when he visited MSU in 2011, said she sees promise.

“I think he’ll do a great job with the balance and the time management,” Thornton said. “Being an RCAH student, he will be able to do art in the classroom and also in an extracurricular way…so he can figure out how much he wants to get involved.”

This fall, Cale Coduti said he plans to create a more interactive website to gain a following on MSU’s campus. He also aspires to design his own clothing line.

Wendy Coduti said she has no doubt he will succeed.

“He can make art out of everything,” she said. “He likes to look at things in a different way.”