Valentines Bow Nail Art How To

Valentines Day is coming up this week so I decided to bust out the pinks and draw some pretty bows. This has been done time and time again but I couldn't resist! And I wanted to use the hot pink Zoya Ali that I picked up from Ulta last year (and still hadn't touched). So I came up with this:

Zoya Ali is a hot hot pink that looks red on the nails but over white comes out very fluro pink as you can see on the bow:

Can you believe it's the same colour!? It's much more pink in real life, the flash makes it a lot warmer and I couldn't adjust the white balance enough to make true to colour. Fluro pink is hard to pick up on camera. It makes me wonder if this is the 'Ali' used in the Pretty Little Liars intro where they paint the dead girl's nails since her name was Ali. I should google it. Oh there is a whole site dedicated to the nail polish of PLL! Wow! Hmm I don't know, the base nails in the picture sort of look white enough to bring out the fluro-ness but the formula isn't that thick. This polish came out Summer 2009 and the show started in 2010. But I digress, this was three coats of Zoya Ali. I got a little distracted haha ;-)

Firstly I dotted the centre of the bow with OPI Alpine Snow. I used a dotter on the other nails but I drew it on the thumb as it needed to be a bit bigger.

Then with my trusty nail art brush I drew the two sides of the bow, outlines first.

Then I filled the bows.

This 'last' step is probably the most time consuming part. I shaped my brush to a very fine tip with nail polish remover and carefully dipped the brush in the polish and lightly drew the bow detail. I started with the dots in the middle then worked on the little ovals down the bottom and finally worked around the outline set by the white. Added some strokes in the middle to make it look 'creased' then that was it! It looks a lot harder than it was, it was just drawing fine lines.

I also decided against adding the ribbon hanging down on the nails because I thought I didn't have enough room. If I started my bows higher up I might have been able to make it work. Instead I'll keep the thumb as the 'feature nail'.

Anyway I hope you enjoyed the look and have a fabulous Valentines day if you celebrate it :-) We will probably go for a picnic next weekend since the weather this weekend has been too rainy. I plan to consume a lot of cheese, weeeee. See you next time!