Monday, July 14, 2014

The Digital Dozen does Countries & Cultures - Day 1: Egyptian Hieroglyphic Nail Art


Holy wow, it has already been another month - I can't believe how fast time is flying! Today marks the start of another Digital Dozen week and this time we are tackling the theme "Counties & Cultures."I decided to focus more on the "cultures" aspect of this theme because I'm a history buff and there are so many amazingly interesting cultures from days past. I decided to start near the beginning of human culture, and represented the ancient Egyptians by painted some hieroglyphics on old papyrus paper! 
I am fascinated by ancient Egyptian culture and their ideas on the afterlife. I attempted to paint the hieroglyphs from the Papyrus of Ani and tried (tried!) to duplicate an image of Anubis from the Book of the Dead. It was really intimidating, but I'm really excited that I managed to paint all of these! I just hope that I didn't accidentally write out something offensive in ancient hieroglyphs ;)
I started with a base of American Apparel's Cotton and painted TONS of horizontal and vertical lines in a fawn colored acrylic paint to simulate the woven pattern of old papyrus paper. Thankfully, this didn't take too long since I wasn't going for accuracy with my base design. Here's the papyrus base on it's own:
Next up was the hieroglyphics. Those pesky pesky hieroglyphics! I did these with black acrylic paint and a SUPER trimmed down detail brush (seriously, that baby is like 4 short hairs). I can't say I have any tricks on these. Just have too much patience for you own good. I think my eyes finally went cross eyed for good after this one ;) 

I finished the look off with the my attempt at Anubis (he ushered people into the afterlife) but he was really tough to paint. The fine details were no cake walk and his face is a bit of a jumbled mess, but I think you can still kind of tell who it is? 
I also ended up adding a matte top coat to these and that traitorous bottle had white on the brush and got all over my mani D: grrrr!
What do you guys think of these? What country or culture would you be representing this week? Now that I've got some ideas on different cultures to do, I'm pretty excited about this week's challenge! Be sure to check out what all the other ladies in the Digital Dozen come up with this week via the inlinkz below! 
Happy Polishing :)