The first NTNA pre-challenge was to create a hand painted look that encouraged us to ‘play outside the box’ when it comes to nail art. The artwork could only be hand-painted using acrylic paint, gel polish and polish on 5 nail tips. I started brainstorming in my inspiration book with lots of exciting ideas. When researching ‘creative play’ by CND, the main detail that stood out to me were bright, fun colours. I love watercolour designs especially by Rongrong DeVoe who specialises in fashion based watercolour flecked designs and I drew inspiration for my bright design from this artists work.
I wanted to use Creative ‘play’ful twists throughout my design, which featured: the world to symbolise the semi-finalists for NTNA Top 24 from all over the world, featuring the UK where I am based and USA where Nails Mag is based. The design featured bursts of creative colour, a Creative Play nail polish bottle ‘exploding’ with colourful and bright, abstract patterns and inspiration to symbolise a Nail Tech’s creative mind working and bursting with ideas whilst creating their masterpieces. Next to this bottle, is a second Creative Play Nail polish bottle that has been spilt, creating a puddle of bright colour around the base. I also featured a Nail Tech hand holding a paint brush covered in paint to resemble the workings of a Nail Tech creating their colourful masterpiece. The last part of this design was two clocks, as I have a slight obsession with clocks so had to feature them – this symbolises the two different times of UK and LA time which I have worked with throughout the challenge.
I have thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to create this playful and bright nail design and what skills I have learnt on the journey and I hope to be able to have the opportunity to create more.
Watch how I created the design here: https://youtu.be/M_JTWX3v0CQ
Step-by-Step Nail Art Tutorial
1
The first step was to outline the world by creating a globe, which I featured in the centre of the nails to signify this being the centre of the world. I used a watered down dark blue acrylic paint. I also outlined the first Creative Play nail polish bottle in a watered down black acrylic paint, to make the globe appear to be coming from the bottle.
2
I then outlined the shape of the countries, keeping the USA and UK in focus in the same dark blue.
3
With a watered down dark blue acrylic paint, I filed in the ocean part of the world. I kept this wet to give a more realistic water effect, rather than a solid colour.
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I repeated the same technique as step 3 to fill in the countries using a green acrylic paint.\n
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I covered the Creative Play bottle with a bright purple acrylic paint and started to highlight the bottleneck with grey acrylic paint.
6
I added a watered down purple section to the polish bottle to look like the glass bottom and then added watered down bursts of colour coming from the bottle around the world of purple, blue, yellow and green to start the ‘explosion of colour’. I used these watered down to create a water-colour look.
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I added the second Creative Play polish bottle in bright neon pink acrylic paint, on its side as if it had been spilt. I started adding detail in a variety of acrylic paint colours to the ‘explosion’ such as circles, origami birds, swirls and abstract shapes and designs. I also added the base for the two clocks in a silver acrylic paint to represent the magpie appeal that all Nail Techs have to anything with shimmer or glitter.
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I added further detail with acrylic paint to the polish bottles and created the spillage with a slightly lighter neon pink acrylic paint. I added the numbers and details to the clocks to show PST time (on the left) being 8 hours behind UK as USA is west to UK on the globe. I created more detail with the colour ‘explosion’. I also started two fingers in the bottom right hand corner to symbolise a Nail Techs fingers that had created the design.
9
I added pink nails onto the fingers in the same shade as the pink polish bottle and added the Creative Play logo in black acrylic paint to the polish bottles and also added highlights in a lighter purple and pink acrylic paint shade and shading in a darker acrylic paint.
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I added paint to the Nail Tech fingers to represent the creativity of a Nail Tech that has been busy at work painting holding a paint brush. I added final touches to the whole design to finesse, highlight and shade. I then top coated the whole design in gel polish topcoat and cured for 30 seconds in an LED lamp and removed the tacky layer
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