Nail of the Week: Fish Nails

Click on photo to enlarge

click on photo to enlarge

This week I did a theme for my nails that I've never done before, fishes. I wanted to paint a fish on every nail but most of my nails art much to long and thin to paint such a wide design and I didn't want the fish to be super small, so I did the fish scales on the rest of the nails and just did the fish on the thumb.
1) I started off by painting two coats of orange polish, I used Essie's Brazilliant, which I purchased at Ross for $3.00. It is a beautiful shimmery warm toned orange that was totally opaque in two coats. click here  to purchase it. but any orange color will do
2) I painted two coats of black nail polish on both of my thumbs, I used Sinful colors "black on black" but again any black nail polish will do.
3) I added one thin coat of a gold shimmer (not glitter) topcoat over the orange nails. This is just to add a bit of sheen to the orange in the fish scales and give them more dimension. the color I chose was by Icing and it was called "Glimmer Girl" Icing polishes are $4.50 by one get one half off and are excellent quality.
4) Using black acrylic paint I purchase at my local Joann's crafts for $0.59 a bottle and a small size dotting tool I created the scales by forming large overlapping u shapes. My dotting tool was purchased as part of a 15 piece brush set on Ebay for $2.85 with free shipping. click here to purchase this set. If you do not have a set the same thing can be accomplished with the tip of a pencil and acrylic paint.
5) Using my dotting tool I filled in alternating rows of the scales with gold acrylic paint.
6) I sealed in the design with my favorite topcoat NYC in a New York Minute in "grand central station" click here to purchase.
7) For the fish I found a simple drawing of a goldfish and used that as my model. I outlined the basic shape with white acrylic paint and my small size dotting tool and then filled the body with orange acrylic paint
8) After I let that completely dry I went back in with my small size dotting tool and my black acrylic paint and added the eyes and the scales
9) I sealed in my fish design with my favorite topcoat.

Water based acrylic paints make a design like this so much easier. It would be next to impossible to achieve this amount of detail with nail polish that gets clumpy and gloopy after a few minutes. Also acrylic paint allows you to wash off your design with water if you make a mistake. Just remember to seal in the finished look with a good topcoat or it will wash off :) I hope you enjoyed this week's nail design. Thanks for reading and have a great week.