This was my first attempt at nail art. Ever. I’d bought some cheap brushes and dotting tools from eBay, had a small collection of nail polishes that I already owned, but had never done anything creative with and had bought a couple of new polishes, including a top-coat and base-coat the day before.
I’d spent some time looking through tutorials on the internet trying to determine where would be a good place to start. Obviously choosing a complicated design first time would be setting myself up for failure and it’s important to have small successes when embarking upon a new hobby, especially a creative one, otherwise I find it easy to lose interest and move on to a new pastime.
So the tutorial for this came from Nail Art 101 which has loads of great tutorials on it categorised according to difficulty. I’m hoping to try a few more from this site in future. It made the flowers look simple, so I thought I’d give it a go.
Using the dotting tool was easier than I first thought it would be, and I came to understand why dots feature so heavily in so many designs labelled “beginner” or “easy”. This was reassuring as it seems there is a lot that can be done with a fairly simple tool and technique, so plenty to keep me going as a beginner. I do hope to move on to more complex, hand painted designs at some point though.
I also learnt that the polish can quickly become dry and sticky on the dotting tool and can leave unattractive hair-like threads on the nails. Keeping the polish from drying too much was the first challenge for me, so I kept mixing it on the palette I was using and re-dipping the tool for each individual dot.
Colours I used were:
Pure Pearl – Revlon, Sensation – Color Addict, Baby Pink – Sweet Closet (Japanese Brand), White – Bon Bon (Japanese Brand)
I was fairly pleased with the final result considering it was my first attempt. The flowers weren’t very even sized and some of them could be neater. It’s a design I’ll certainly revisit and try to perfect in future.
My Adventures in Nail Art 