Tuesday, July 15, 2014

The Digital Dozen does Countries & Cultures - Day 2: Cherry Blossom Nail Art

Nothing to Disclose

So as you all know, I am the world's BEST procrastinator. I can't get anything done until the last minute and Digital Dozen week is no different. I got home from work and the gym after 9pm and was perplexed on what to do for today and even considered just heading to bed with naked nails. But I decided to stick it out and relied on something I don't often do: brainstorming! When I first started brainstorming for countries & cultures, I wrote down all the continents and noted different countries on said continents that sparked my interest.

One such was Japan, and since I'm' a nature lover, I was immediately drawn to the gorgeous cherry blossoms that they have there.


I love to travel and would enjoy traveling most places in the world just for the experience, but if I were to travel to Japan I think I would most love the landscape there. I'd happily spend a week staring up at Mount Fuji while surrounded my blooming cherry blossoms :) I need to book my flight!


When I was looking at photos of cherry blossoms, so many of them focus on the flowers, leaving the background grass and sky blurry...which got me thinking about my background. Instead of a solid color, I went for a gradient to represent the blurred grass and sky! I've recently discovered doing gradients with acrylic paint and I think I'm a convert! The clean up is ridiculously easy (I almost feel like I'm cheating) and the blending works great. Since acrylic is water based and doesn't adhere to your skin, you can just gently scrape off the excess polish on your skin with a bit of water and your fingernail.


I used black acrylic to paint the branch across my nails and then added in the base of the cherry blossom with China Glaze's Spring in My Step. I added a dark pink center to each flower with American Apparel's Rose Bowl and finished everything off with a few short lines of brown in Zoya's Louise in the centers. I added a few random strokes of dark red to represent budding cherry stems, but they got lost in the mix a bit.

I ended up mattifying these (because mattifying is a way of life!) and I love how these turned out. I know that cherry blossoms have been done a bunch in nail art, but hopefully I've provided a nice take on them to add to the mix.

Be sure to check out the inlinkz below to see the other posts this week!

Happy Polishing :)