Ahhh... it's nice to feel myself returning to a "normal" posting schedule. I'm going to be reverting back to the M-W-F nail art schedule, with Swatch It on Saturdays - a schedule I haven't been on since November, before the 31DC and the 12DOC challenges that consumed the past two months! Also, my goal is to get a tutorial up on YouTube every 2 weeks for now, until I get faster with filming and editing videos (it takes forEVER!). Today, though, the focus is all about my monthly collab with Cat of Belle Glamour, and our mutual love for all things Harry Potter. This month we decided to pay tribute to one of our favorite scenes from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - when Ron and Harry fly Mr. Weasley's flying Ford Anglia right into the Whomping Willow in their effort to get to Hogwarts on time!
This look was really REALLY hard to photograph because the details are all so dark, so I don't have a plethora of pics the way I normally would, so I apologize in advance. Also, getting to the final look was actually quite a series of processes, so I'll just briefly tell you how I did it.
- Create stamping decal of the car (I used Cici & Sisi 07 and MoYou Nails Light Blue). Fill in the headlights with pale yellow polish, add characters' heads and hair with dotting tool. Set aside to dry.
- Begin with a medium blue base on all nails. Apply one thin coat of China Glaze Fairy Dust, then topcoat.
- Use 3 varying shades of blue and the watercolor technique to make a cloudy night sky, then topcoat again.
- Apply a matte topcoat to prepare the nails for acrylic paint.
- Add Whomping Willow tree details to all nails. I turned my thumb into the twisty, gnarled trunk, and created one of the "fists" on each nail with brown acrylic paint, then added shading with black paint and a liner brush. Add branches with liner brush and brown paint. To create the "leaves", I roughly mixed together green, yellow, and brown paint on my palette and used my rattiest brush to push the paint into the spaces between my branches.
- Add topcoat to the ring finger and carefully place decal, smoothing down the edges. Once set, add another layer of topcoat to seal the decal into place. Topcoat all the other nails.
- As a final step, I also used a dotting tool to add black acrylic paint over the "wheels" of my decal, because the original stamp was a solid color, so I basically just covered the existing blue wheels with black.
Hope you're all off to a great week, and I'll see ya Wednesday!
PS: Have you entered my giveaways yet? Don't forget there's an additional set of goodies up for grabs on my Instagram!