Hello again! Still updating all those posts that I meant to keep up with. This one is really late, because I painted these for the premier of the movie Warm Bodies when it came out on February 1st. Clearly it was a while ago, but I'm still going to post it. I didn't intend to make this a tutorial, but I took pictures (really bad pictures) for each step, so I guess I'll just go ahead and explain how I did this:
I designed it to look like R from Warm Bodies. I think they turned out pretty nice up close, but they're a little hard to tell what they are from far away. But they were still fun to paint, and pretty easy by my standards!
Here are the polishes I used:
From left to right: Seche Clear base coat, China Glaze Starboard, China Glaze Secret Peri-Wink-le, Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Petal Pusher, Ulta Concrete Evidence, Wet n' Wild Wild Shine Red Red, e.l.f. Smoky Brown, e.l.f. Black, and Seche Vite topcoat. And if you look closely enough, you can see one of my unfinished paintings in the background. Yay!
First Step (and again, I apologize for the quality of these pictures):
First, add a base coat. Then, using a make-up sponge (I usually pull off a small piece of a larger sponge and use tweezers to grab it), dip/paint some green nail polish on to the sponge and then dab it LIGHTLY on to your nails in random spots. When I say lightly, I mean lightly. You don't want it to over power your other polishes, you just want enough on there to balance the red in your nails. In other words, it makes them look less alive.
Second Step:
Repeat exactly what you did with the green polish now with the blue. You can use whatever blue polish you want, but I definitely suggest using one that has some grey in it. It makes the "skin" part look bruised and even more washed out. You wouldn't want vibrant splotches of blue on a design that's supposed to look dead. And again, make sure you use a light hand with this. It's important for the next part.
Third Step:
Now you'll need a very sheer nude color. It needs to be sheer so it can pick up the green and blue undertones you just painted on your nails. If you don't have a sheer nude color (It needs to be close to the same color as your own skin), you may want to just forget that I told you to use a light hand with the green and blue and make the splotches more opaque. The goal of this is to change the color of the nude polish without using crazy techniques or finding a polish that is this dead color specifically. Unfortunately, you can't really tell from my photos, but the green and blue definitely came through the nude polish. And I'd just like to add that the nude is usually almost identical to my skin color, so you can see how much of a difference the green and blue make in the above picture! It's so pale and yellow now.
Fourth Step:
For this step, you'll need a light grey polish to make R's shirt. I basically just swiped it on my nail about 2/3 of the way up. I left plenty of "skin" showing, because that's an important part of this too! A great thing about this step: it doesn't need to be perfect! R is a zombie and his shirt is tattered and dirty. So you can be messy if you have trouble with things like this!
Fifth Step:
This is probably the most difficult step. It was for me, at least. If you look at photos of R close-up, you can see he has green veins in his neck, so I used the same green I used in the first step and a really small dotting tool to make random veins just above the shirt line. Unfortunately for me, they came out look like vines or some kind of vegetation rather than veins. I would suggest using maybe a tooth pick or a teeny tiny brush to make these. And possibly a sheerer green, if you have one! But I don't think you should just skip this step. It adds that last touch to the "skin."
Sixth Step:
Holy Saturation, Batman! I'm particularly sorry about this picture, the red looks crazy bright because of my camera. At least on my monitor, it does. But this is the next step! R wears a red hoodie, so I just added two quick swipes toward the top center of my nail, chevron style. Super easy! You might get your cuticles messy at this point (if you've avoided it thus far), because you really want to cover the entire tip of your nail. It is a jacket, after all.
Final Step:
This was my favorite step. Now you just get to make all your hard work look dirty! I took a dusty brown (I was afraid a regular brown would look too abrasive) and black polish and used the same make-up sponge technique from early to dab it onto the shirt and the jacket. I highly suggest using the brown more over the black, because I found that the more black I used, the more my nails looked like they had been singed in a fire. I also used a small dotting tool and the brown polish to kind of outline the neckline of the shirt because there was almost zero contrast between my grey and the skin color I had created. You may not have to do that, though! It just depends on your grey. Also very important for this step: Focus the brown and black mainly on the clothes. It's not a problem if you get a little bit of dirt on the "skin," but you don't want to cover up your veins or that nice, dead-looking skin you made. Plus, R isn't really that dirty in the movie. And the very last thing to do is just add top coat and clean up your cuticles, and tada! There you have it.
If you haven't seen Warm Bodies, go see it. It was an amazing movie, and I definitely plan on seeing it again! And if you haven't gone yet (or if you're going again, like me), maybe you could try this out! I know the movie has been out for a while, but there's still time! I hope you enjoyed this, I probably won't be doing very many tutorials, because I tend to keep my nails simple. This was a special occasion! Thanks for reading, have a good day, and happy painting! :)
