The artful and painstaking craft of making customized cowboy boots by hand has been a tradition in Texas for some 150 years, ever since the days of the great cattle drives along the Chisholm Trail, when boots were considered much more of a necessary tool of a tough trade than they are now. Collectively, today’s custom bootmakers—both familiar legends and new outfits—continue the practice with one eye on that mythic past and one on the limitless future.The boot’s general form hasn’t changed much in all those years, but the creativity and attention paid to the finer aesthetic details has reached new heights. At El Paso’s Rocketbuster Handmade Custom Boots, the shafts of their footwear are canvases for a dizzying array of colorful and often campy…The post Behold the Art of the Cowboy Boot: Bolder and Better Crafted Than Ever appeared first on Texas Monthly.