I is for Inspired

Welcome back to A2Z – I hope you had a wonderful couple of festive weeks and are excited about 2015!

I was actually inspired to do this mani by a stamping plate I got for Christmas from my lovely sister; she picked out FOUR MoYou plates for me from my wishlist and one of them was Hipster 08 which has a selection of different full nail designs, one of which is bowler hats. The bowler hats got me thinking about Magritte’s famous surrealist self portrait The Son of Man which inspired this mani…

 

Originally I did have a second accent nail which did have the stamped hats on BUT I decided it looked too fussy so they got removed and replaced with the plain dark blue (which is meant to echo the colour of his suit) – I used Essie Snake It Up from their magnetic range but I didn’t use the magnet on it. This is super opaque and can be a one coater fairly easily.

So, I thought I would do you a little tutorial on my lil The Son of Man recreation because this design only took me about 20 minutes to do and I think it actually pretty achievable.

Please forgive my lack of skills in the creation of the tutorial, it was just me on my laptop using paint but I did my best to break it down.

1) Start with your favourite sky blue or blue grey (I chose China Glaze Bahamian Escape, 2 coats)

2) Water down some white acrylic and apply either with a fan brush or a bit of sponge to create some clouds, you could also use a dry brush and a sheer white. Don’t stress too much most of this will be painted over.

3) Add your head shape – this is a pretty standard beige egg with too little blobs on the side for ears. I mixed mine using yellow, red, brown and a lot of white.

4) Add your shading – take a touch more brown and red to darken your beige and add shadow down one side.

5) Paint a rectangle of white below your beige oval – this will be the start of the shirt and blazer.

6) Add two blue grey triangles onto your rectangle, pulling up to the side of the oval.

7) Paint in a diamond or triangle of red (depends on your nail length, as mine are quite short I only had room for a triangle).

8) Paint on your blue grey bowler – create a horizontal curve (the rim of the hat) then add a semi-circle on top. The hat should overlap the top of your beige oval and take up approximately 1/3rd of your nail. It is a big feature!

9) To join the hat to your head give your dude a little bit of hair above his ears.

10) Blob on your lime green apple – start by creating a circle right in the middle of the dude’s face, then add some leaves coming off it. There are four leaves in the original but you can have as many or few as you like.

11) Add on a darker green (I added blue to my lime)  around the very outer right hand side of your apple and into the leaves.

12) BLEND – you need another green tone between the blue green and the lime green and use this to further shade and shape your apple and leaves – just keep building the colour and shadows until you’re happy. Don’t forget to add that white gleam on the left hand side.

13) Allow to dry and topcoat!

I hope that was useful and if  you have a go I would love to see! I know it looks like a lot of steps but most of them are really quick and small, I just wanted to break it all the way down – its just a few shapes and colours. I used my detail brush (again) from Born Pretty Store and just regular cheap acrylic paint with water.

 

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