Artwork

I've seen pictures of nails inspired by famous works of art before and I thought that they were just beautiful. I decided to look up paintings a while back and pinned one on pinterest. Then I realised that it's an Autumn painting and since I live in the Southern Hemisphere, Spring has just started. The picture that I originally pinned was a Monet, so I looked up his work. I decided to go with Irises In Monets Garden.

The colours that I chose are Con-fused? by China Glaze Magnetix, Coach Ella by Fresh Paint, Envious by Kmart, Bananarama by Kmart, Glowstick by Wet n Wild Fergie, A-piers to be Tan by OPI, Snow Me White by Sinful Colours, Lavender Soap by Revlon Parfumerie, my unknown black, Summer Rose by boe, Bonna Blue by Fresh Paint, and two Chi Chi Magnetic polishes that don't have names.

I started off with painting my nails Coach Ella. I wanted to have a base colour before I put in the details to make sure that all of the base coat was covered. The reason that I chose this colour was because it was neutral and light enough that it wouldn't matter if it was seen where it shouldn't be and it was easy enough to cover up.

The next step that I did was to create the path. I figured that this way it wouldn't matter if the grass went a little out of control. I started doing the path by putting down some black. The brown went on top of that. I then decided that it needed some lighter colours and so I mixed some yellow and brown.

I did the grass next. I started with using a small brush and Glowstick. I realised that it wasn't showing up well, so when I started adding Envious, I did it with a dotting tool.

I decided that the dotting tool looked weird and went back to the small brush. It ended up giving me the strokes that I wanted to be seen and I really liked how it looked with the different shades of green. I also mixed the different polishes a bit to make more shades.

I finally added a bunch of spots with the small brush to represent the flowers. Monet's style lends well to nail art, at least with my tools, because of the strokes and blurriness, for lack of a better term. I chose to use a small brush to show that the flower shapes weren't perfect. I put the polishes of similar colours, ie the purple and lavendar together and the summer rose and pink together, and had them at the brush at the same time. I like how this added depth to the flower groups since one colour didn't end up drying before adding the other.

I was very pleased with the overall manicure, but I wasn't able to capture that in a picture very well. Some manicures just don't want to photograph well! Here are a few pictures to try to capture the essence of this mani.

An InLinkz Link-up