Watercolour Flowers & Tutorial.

Hello girlies. I am looking forward to the weekend now, we are nearly there!

I have a lovely floral design which was inspired by this manicure by sabzmasih on instagram to show you today. This was one of these designs that I saw and then put on my nails as soon as I could, it's just so pretty! I've also done a tutorial to show you how I did these. 

For more read on after the jump.

I used a watercolour technique for the flowers, hence why I called them watercolour flowers..

To do this design you will need a few different tools and polishes. You will need a white polish for your base (I used Sinful Colors - Snow Me White) and a black polish for the outlines (I used W7 - Black). You will need a few different polishes for your petals, I used a few different ones from the same colour family but it's up to you which colours you use. The ones I used were Essie - Under Where?, Rimmel - Show Off, Barry M - Dragonfruit and China Glaze - Heat Index. The last polish you will need is a yellow for the centre of your flower, I used China Glaze - Metro Pollen-tin. You will also need some nail polish remover, a dotting tool, a detail brush and a slightly larger soft brush. 

First you need to paint all your nails white (or whatever colour you are using for you base if you don't want white). Make sure this is completely dry before moving onto the next step.

Take your first colour and blob a bit of the polish on with your dotting tool, in the area that you want your flower to be. This doesn't have to be neat, as it won't stay like this for long. If you don't have a dotting tool you could use things like a hair grip or a nail art brush to apply the polish. You just need to make sure it's a fairly thick blob. 

You then want to take your soft nail art brush dipped in nail polish remover and dab this over the blobs of polish on your nail. You want to do this as soon as you can after applying the blobs so they don't dry. I wouldn't recommend using a really strong polish remover as it will just remove all the polish, you want to just thin it for the watercolour effect. I find this easiest with a softer brush as a stiff one will push through your base, if you don't have a suitable brush a cotton bud should work. 

Next you apply your second colour in the blobs again with your dotting tool and follow the same process to thin out the polish. 

Keep repeating this process with all of your chosen colours until you are happy with the effect. It doesn't have to look perfect, the abstract, messy look is what you are going for! Looking back at this photo now I should have mixed the colours a bit more with the remover, I did mix it more in the original mancure I did on my nails.

Next you can move onto adding the petals. Using a detail brush and your black polish (or acrylic paint if you find that easier) add some smaller petals near the centre of the flower. Make sure to leave a space in the middle of the flower. If you are not confident with freehand nail art you could always skip this step and just have larger petals as they are easier to paint. 

Then you need to add the larger petals. I always start at the base of the petal and sweep the brush out to the point at the end, if that makes sense.

The next step is to add some tiny little circles in the centre of the flower in black, these do not have to be perfect.. it would be pretty much impossible to get perfect circles that small anyway! Again this is a step you can skip if you are not confident with freehand. 

If you have any gaps in your petals you can fill those using a dotting tool. 

The final step is to add a dab of yellow to the middle of your flower, I used my dotting tool again to do this. Then obviously add a topcoat to seal it all in. 

You could use so many different colours for this design, but I am loving the girly pink colour scheme I went for. 

There are quite a few steps to this design, so it's not something you want to do in a rush. But I personally think that this is worth the effort :).

I hope you all liked this design and the tutorial. I want to try this with lots of different colours and wear it all summer! If you do give this design a go don't forget to tag me, I would love to see your recreations. 

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Thanks for looking.

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