Sunday, August 4, 2013

31 Day Nail Art Challenge - Day 7: Black and White Nails

You should all be scolding me for how terrible I am at keeping up with this challenge. I feel like I've got a good excuse this time since I was visiting family out of town the last two nights, but I still feel badly that I'm late with these posts more often than on time! An extra big sorry to Meghan and a ginormous thank you for putting up with me! ;)

For today's look, I was inspired by Arabic/Persian artwork! The boyfriend is trying to learn Arabic for his work and I noticed a really cool round pattern on the cover of one of his workbooks and was immediately inspired to find a pattern that I liked in the same vein. I fumbled around on google images and came across this one and I got to working! 

This was a tough design for me to keep clean - I really struggled with brush drag on this one :/ I wish it was a bit cleaner looking, but I'm still happy with the amount of detail I was able to get out of this. I'll have to hunt down an even smaller paint brush now! I do love my art supply shopping so I can't complain too much ;) 
I achieved this look with my no. 10/0 brush from Michael's again and used black acrylic paint, rather than trying to fight with my fast drying black polish. The base is Cotton Buds by Butter London (great white, but a bit thick) and I used Essie's Matte About You to help bring out the detail in the photos a bit better. 
I started by painting a square in the center of my nail, then another rotated square on top of that. I then painted even smaller squares on the corner of those squares (square-ception!). From there, it was a matter of attempting to paint tiny hearts off of each tiny square and filling in the extra lines at the end. 
Despite the flaws that I see in this, I really do love this look. My camera seems to bring the mess-ups out a bit more than in person so I'll still enjoy looking at them in person. 

Happy Polishing! :)