American Southwest Nails

Seeing a few dreamcatcher nails and a turquoise nail tutorial using the saran-wrap method(no original link, anyone have it?), I decided to do a whole Southwestern themed nail set! A lot of this was spontaneous, but I am in awe at how awesome they came out.




For my pinky, I used Mrcandiipants style multi-line design. You can find the tutorial Here! I used a lot of colors and overlapped quite a bit, which left it with the softer look.

On the ring finger is a feather, over an "acid-wash" wood. I originally was going for a brown gradient, but somehow this came out. I layered three browns, light to dark, and then used a striping brush dipped in acetone to strip the layers back. This ended up as a really cool effect!!

The middle finger is what inspired this whole set! I saw a tutorial for turquoise with a golden saran wrap effect. Sadly, it wasn't by the original poster and lacked a watermark, so I can't give credit here. I did differ from the tutorial - I did two layers of saran wrap effect. The base coat is a dark turquoise, followed by a light turquoise saran wrapped, then a gold glitter saran wrapped.
This wasn't the exact effect I wanted, but I think playing around with the layering will pull off what I want ^^

The index finger was originally going to be a simple tribal nail. Instead, I completely effed it up and restarted. By this point I had the "Southwestern" theme firmly stuck in my brain, so I used Kokopelli! Kokopelli is a Native American deity of fertility and agriculture and is an iconic image for the American Southwest. I also remember reading a series of novels when I was younger, that focused on the idea of Kokopelli being based on a real person and brought this character to life.

Finally, the thumb was inspired by the all the dreamcatcher nails I've been seeing on tumblr! I wanted to add my own spin, so instead of painting it from the base of the nail to the tip I went sideways. When I was little I really loved dreamcatchers and find the folklore behind them fascinating.