Nerd with Nails: Tale as old as time

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Tale as old as time

The theme for today is yellow. I'm not a fan of the colour yellow at all, so I didn't want to do just a yellow manicure. I remembered that I had pinned a beautiful drawing of Belle from Beauty and the Beast on Pinterest not too long ago because I thought that it was beautiful and I could adapt it for nail art. The drawing is from the etsy site EmilyNewmanArt, however this drawing is no longer available. Beauty and the Beast also plays a significant role in my life because that was my husband and my first date and my wedding dress was from a designer that bases their dresses on Disney princesses and mine was inspired by Belle.

I chose to go with a pale blue for the background and here are the polishes that I used. Bonna Blue from Fresh Paint, Belsize Park from nails inc, Coach Ella from Fresh Paint, A-Piers to be Tan from OPI, Dangerous from Sephora, Lily White from ulta 3, and my unknown black.

I started drawing Belle by doing an outline of her silhouette in black. Since I often have a problem with making my black lines too thick, I decided to start with this instead of her skin colour.

Next I filled in with Coach Ella. This got rid of some of the extra thick black lines.

Her eyes and nose came next. It's hard to see them in this picture, though. I painted white blobs with a small brush and then used my dotting tool to create the brown irises. I then mixed a bit of black and brown to make the pupils and draw little lines above her eyes for her eyebrows/eyelashes. Her nose is just a couple of small black dots that I connected.

Her lips were next. They ended up being kind of messy as more polish than I had desired made it onto my nail. I had to try to take some of it off with my dotting tool while trying not to smudge it. Mostly I just had to put more Coach Ella on to try to fix it.

I finally go to the point that I could paint her hair and make it look more like a princess and less like an alien. First I just did it with the brown. I realized that it gave it too flat of a look. No one's hair, not even a cartoon character, is only one colour. I decided to mix some brown and black. I didn't evenly mix them so they had a swirled appearance when applied. It gave me a much better end result.

The yellow swirls of the dress were the final touches. I painted them on with my dotting tool. It seems to give me better swirls because the polish is thicker. I did the yellow swirls and then I mixed some brown and yellow together to add different shades. The middle finger on my right hand is supposed to represent the bodice of the dress, but I think that it really just looks messy. I don't like that finger, but I do like the manicure overall.