My first attempt at owl nail art.

Owl Nail Art

I have been obsessed with owl anything this past year so when I saw MissJenFabulous’s Owl Nail Art video over six months ago I knew I had to give it a whirl (I finally decided to do it for my vacation trip back home and they lasted the whole week — I received great compliments too). I love Jen’s videos and this one is so short and straight to the point and the owls are incredibly cute. Have a look at her video tutorial:

I practised this once on some plastic fingers and again on a post-it note. I highly recommend practising what you are going to do before hand so you can get a feel for each of your polish choices and how they react when using a dotting tool etc.

First things first was the owl base to represent the main feather area. I used :

I worked the colors on both hands using the self-adhesive reinforcements like Jen did in the video. I almost stopped there because I liked the look so much but I’ll have to remember to do this another time — one color obviously.

To start things off I used paper hole reinforcements to give a nice curve at the nail bed.

When I looked at all four colors on my nails I kind of cringed a bit. I can humbly admit I am horrible at coordinating more than two colors but I was also limited by the choice of shimmer polishes I had. I wanted them to be in the same family at least and somewhat similar to video.

I love the look of the exposed matrix.

But once I started putting on the details it really pulled the colors together and made them look much better.

For the details I used:

  • Sally Hansen Lavender Cloud (bellies)
  • Julep Catrina (yellow eyes)
  • Art Deco black (pupils)
  • Julep Nan (beak)
  • Julep Rooney (stomach spots)

If you have any Sally Hansen whites in the Complete Salon Manicure I highly recommend them for doing the belly because the brush is so wide and made it so much easier to get the owl belly shape.

This Sally Hansen polish seems to be my go-to when I am doing nail art.

Once the eyes go in it really starts to come together across all fingers. They are pretty cute already!

I find I am getting better at dotting eyes the more practice I get. They are pretty cute.

And then the beaks. I used a little brush which I can control more than a striping brush for intricate details.

A little more cuteness with the addition of the beaks.

Then the belly spots.

I tried to vary the size of the dots like she did but occasionally forgot, still not bad.

I think they turned out pretty good if I do say so myself! Bare in mind no one will be looking as close as these pictures so the little flubs will be unnoticeable.

I had so much fun doing this nail art and love the results.

It wasn’t too hard; the left hand was considerably more tricky of course but I made a point of working on it first. This is the best nail art to turn out on my left hand so far. Overall, I would totally recommend attempting this nail art. I’d like to do it again with some funky pastels.

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Topic Links
* More MissJenFabulous ideas from Polish and Pearls
* Pick up new shades at Julep

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