Do It Yourself Tuesdays: Look Hot with Nail Art!

Are you an artist? No? But wait–don’t you spend at least 50% of your Intro to Philosophy class time doodling curly-cues in your notebook? Yeah, I thought so. Good enough.

You don’t have to be a Monet to do nail art, because it’s basically as simple as paint-by-number. If you can copy that complicated stats diagram into your notes, then trust me, you can put a gorgeous sprig of florals on your nail. Plus, your friends will be totes jealous when they all drop twenties on French manicures and your nails look a zillion times better for only the cost of the polish you grabbed at the drugstore.

Speaking of polish, here’s what you need to do this:

- Nail polish (duh)
- Cotton balls or Kleenex
- Toothpicks
- Topcoat (optional)
- Nail-polish remover

It helps to plan out your designs before you do them, especially if your drawing skills, like mine, are limited to scrawling malformed stick figures. Note that you don’t have to do something fancy on each nail – it works just as well to do a nice design on the thumbs (or big toes) and leave the rest of the nails as solid colors. Also, depending on how intricate your design is, you need to plot out an hour or two in your day to do the whole thing, since you have to let each color of the art dry before you can start the next color. The good news is that you can split this time up if necessary, and your nails will look really cool and avant-garde if they aren’t quite done yet.

OK. Got your plan? Good. For the sake of demonstration, I’m going to describe how to do this pretty red flower.

The brushes that come with bottles of polish are nifty tools, but they’re designed for full coats rather than nail art, so I propose that you use something else: toothpicks. Grab a few and keep them nearby.

1. Paint one or two layers of a red base coat. Let it dry thoroughly.

2. Use a toothpick to paint the main white flower on your nail first. Just paint the background shape (the middle circle and five surrounding petals). Then paint the four white leaves around it and the little white dots going outward from it. Grab a new toothpick if yours gets gloppy.

Important: obviously, your nail will not look totally perfect, but that’s OK! Especially since you will be adding more detail as you go, which is the perfect time to fix mistakes and add more pizazz.

3. When the white is COMPLETELY dry, go back to the red. Using a toothpick, start at the narrow end of the striations on the flower petals. Drag the toothpick lightly toward the middle of the flower. If you mess up, wipe it off quickly or glob it on a little more to make a different-looking design. Make striations on each petal this way.

4. Let the red completely dry, then dot on black in the very middle of the flower.

5. With gold polish and another toothpick, make tiny dots around the bottom and sides of the flower. Now let that dry! You know how annoying it is to smudge a normal manicure; imagine messing up all this hard work!

Here are a few more design ideas to get you started:

Orange floral nails
Flamingo nails
Checkerboard
This book is also helpful, though it’s meant for kids

Remember–this is art, and art is subjective. If all else fails, bust out the nail-polish remover and just start over. The point is, you can do it and you can make those nails look great. When everything is dry and finished, put on the topcoat and walk around showing off your hot new nails to everybody!