Penguins and Glitter

Hello all, we're seven days into December which means I have 7 new polishes thanks to my Ciate 2014 Calendar.

For today's tutorial I've used 3 of the colours I've received. Penguin nail art was hugely popular last year thanks to the John Lewis Advert featuring Monty. So I gave it a try this years to help with the winter blues.

I think you can already tell but I didn't have a colour suitably beak coloured so I had improvise with this deep salmon pink.

So first step, as with most of my tutorials, is to paint the nails one colour. For this I used Ciate's Chinchilla polish, and light blue and grey colour. It almost looks slightly lilac as well. It is a plain polish and I used two thin coats to achieve the finish below.

I then took a white polish, Barry M's Cotton, and painted a arch that took over half of the nail up. I tried my best to keep this central leaving as much blue on one side as the other.

Here is where different sized nails really show up. Look at how wide my middle nail looks compared to my ring finger.

Now is the turn of the eyes, I used two slightly different sized dotting tools. Used the bigger one to place two white dots above the belly and the smaller one to add black dots inside these two circles.

Here is the tricky bit. Finding a beak. I was going to use yellow, then I couldn't find a polish that was yellow. I also tried to make orange, but without a yellow it just turns pink. I darkened up the pink to create a deep pastel pink. I used Ciate's encore! and a pale pink polish to create this shade, just playing around with quantities until I found a colour I was more happy with. Using an angled striping brush I then painted in a triangle, with one point elongated out into the belly.

While I had the brush out I also thought it would be cute to add wings to the penguin. To do this I painted on the line of white and blue before curving to create an l shape and a mirrored image of an l for the other side. I did this in a black polish.

For the other two nails, and my thumb, I then added Ciate's all aglow, which is a glitter made up of gold and bronze flecks. I did about two strokes on each nail and attempted to spread the glitter evenly.

On the other hand I also added a heart detail to one of the penguins, mainly to cover a mistake. But it turned out great and the penguins looks so cute.