Easy Caterpillar Nail Art

Here is a easy nail art tutorial for you, this simply uses one dotting tool and a tiny little paintbrush. If you don't have a dotting tool it is possible to use the end of a grip for bigger dots and a paintbrush for smaller ones.

Following on from the animal theme, this tutorial is for this little caterpillar.

For this design I started with a white basecoat, as a few of the green polishes I picked out were a little thin, so having a simple white background behind would help boost the colour.

I next then took a few fimo fruit shapes and cut a chunk out of them to make it appear like they had been eaten. This took a little more work then I thought it would as I was using metal cuticle pusher to cut through the fimo. I think this would have been a lot easier with nail scissors or clippers. When cutting the fimo piece be careful not to create a piece that is too thin as it's likely to break apart. I found in my stash an apple and a melon and placed these onto my nail with a tiny bit of nail glue.

I then set about creating the caterpillar's head on my middle finger. I did this by using a larger dotting tool to create an oval shape of red polish, and going back on top of that with a white and black dot to create an eye. I then created an antenna for the caterpillar by creating two short lines out of the top of it's head and placing a yellow dot on the top of each of these lines.

Now for the fun part, the caterpillar's body. Here I used the larger dotting tool to create oval shapes building up the body. After each dot I would clean off the dotting tool to ensure I could go to any other green shade. I also tried to avoid creating a pattern as I felt doing it this way would create a more organic look. As a little extra touch as the body ended I created a little tail by putting two more smaller dots in a diagonal away from the caterpillar's body.

Then using a black polish I went along the end of the body and placed a little dot at the bottom of every 3 (or so) body segments.

And that's it, I then went over the design with a top coat, making sure I got it around the edges of the fimo shape to try and hold them on for as long as possible.