7 days of floral nail art tutorials - Day 1: the lily

Thursday, May 9, 2013

I recently decided to do seven days of floral nail art. I have day 1 - the lily - for you. While I am not sure I nailed the colors I do love the lilies!

Floral - lily nail art

I started out with a base color of Zoya Perrie. I love this color. It is a dusty shade of light purple.

Then I used acrylic paints to create the lilies. Why do I use acrylic paints? There are several reasons.

Acrylic paints are very economical. A 2 fl. oz. bottle costs around $1 at hobby stores.
The colors are endless and with a bit of mixing you have have any shade you want.

It doesn't dry out as quickly as polish which makes it much easier to work with. When it starts to get thick on the palette just add a bit of water and it's good to go again.

I use the plastic lid of a margarine or sour cream tub as a disposable palette. I can easily use it several times and then I just toss it and start over with a new one.

To start the lilies use a thin nail art brush and create swirls with white acrylic paint on your nail. The swirls don't have to be perfect. Flowers are never perfect in nature.

Then create smaller pink swooshes inside the white swirls.

Using black paint draw the stamen of the flowers. Simply add a dot of yellow paint to the end to add the detail.

Then using a dotting tool and white paint dot white spots on the pink part of the flower. You can do this before the black if you want. Just random dots add a lot of detail and depth to the lily.

Using green paint (I added a bit of black paint to the green to make it slightly darker.) add the stems and leaves. To create realistic leaves push down with your brush and pull in and up at the same time.