Wednesday, April 16, 2014

The Digital Dozen does Texture - Day 3: Sunflower Nail Art


Hi everyone! Day 3 of the Digital Dozen is upon us and I've got some hand painted sunflowers to share with you all today :) 

This has been a tough challenge week for me and I'm flying by the seat of my pants to an extent as I don't know what I'm doing until the night of. I was trying to think of things I wanted to paint, and then see if I could fit that to meet the "textured" theme...and since I love my florals, I wanted to paint flowers. 

I started thinking about flowers with a lot of texture and sunflowers came to mind immediately. Not only are their petals full of interesting ridges, the seeds in the center provide a ton of textural interest. 

Now, I know there isn't any physical texture in these, but I tried my best to recreate the ridges in the petals and the seeds in the center so that they looked textural. I initially thought about adding some flocking powder around the circumference of the center, but when I dug out my flocking powder, I realized I only had dark purple...not exactly the look I was going for! 
To get this look, I started with a base polish of Zoya's Boy Toi (I hate that name haha) then, believe it or not, used China Glaze's Budding Romance as the base for the center of the flower. Using American Apparel's Manila, I painted the flowers around the edge of the center, then added highlights and shadows with yellow and black acrylic paint. 
The center detailing is done with a combination of Zoya's Louise and OPI's A-Piers to be Tan. I tried (poorly) to recreate the intricate layout of sunflower seeds in the center, but holy cow, it's impossible at this scale and with polish. I finished off the look with a bit more Budding Romance in the center and added a ring of black dots around the edge of the center to mimic the "fuzz" in the center. 
While I love how this came out, I feel like I didn't do a great job with the texture part of the challenge. I contemplated adding some brown caviar beads around the center edges, but after I finished painting this, I couldn't bring myself to add them. I don't like caviar beads and it just felt wrong! 
So what do you think of this look? Do you think I strayed too far from the texture theme? Be sure to check out the inlinkz below to see the other ladies' manis for the day! 
Happy Polishing :)