Hand Painted Rambling Rose Nails

Alright, I'll level with you, this design is not exactly easy or quick to achieve. However, sometimes you want a garden on your nails even if it takes a bit of time. I for one find doing my nails a relaxing me-time kind of treat and so I have included a little tutorial to show you how I achieved the look above. I want to say at the start that this manicure was inspired by the nail blogger LadyCrappo (odd name, beautiful nail designs I assure you). Her nail art is constantly inspiring me! 

I started with a teal and navy gradient as my base, but you could also use a solid color. For a quick primer on how to achieve a gradient like this I shall refer you to an earlier nail tutorial of mine here. Also, gradients are a messy process so I apologize that my fingertips are a bit blue-stained for the remainder of this tutorial!

Dot some white or another pastel on a plastic surface that will serve as your pallet for your mini painting session. You can see my two tools for this nail art above, a medium sized dotting tool (available at sally beauty supply in a set) and a paintbrush I cut down. I literally just took a regular round paint brush and cut off bristles until only a few strands remained to make something thin enough to use for nail art.

First I painted white blobs on my nails, see not so hard to start off with!

 Then I dotted on some creamy yellow blobs on top of my white shapes. I created the graphic below to illustrate how I built up the roses. Create a blob of color, add another layer of dots, then using a tiny brush sweep on small concentric-ish C-shaped "petals". The key to getting these to look like roses is the pattern of the C-shapes, start with two facing each other in the center of the blob/rose and then layer them until you reach the outside of the flower. 

I forgot to bring a darker pink polish over to my work area so I just mixed one from the colors I had sitting on my table. The darkest color is for the C-shaped petals.

Here I have applied petals in pink over my blobs.

Then here I have done the C-shape petals in the darkest color. As always with my nail designs, note the lack of perfection, this is not fine art people! It can be messy and still turn out looking good in the end.

Lastly I added leaves and vines around the flowers. I just took my tiny brush in some olive green polish and drew "vines" connecting the roses, and then little tiny leaf shapes on the vines and at the base of the roses. Finally I added some lighter green highlights to the leaves and the design was finished! Top with a thick layer of topcoat being careful not to smudge anything!

Fini! Notice how sad my cuticles are right now ahhh! And as usual my nails are not all the same length because I am constantly breaking them. I wish I could have them a bit longer and evenly shaped, but it just is never to be when I break them so often! I ended up really liking this design, though I'll admit it was next to impossible to replicate on my right hand. I resorted to adding the roses on my thumb and ring finger as accents only. Despite the level of difficulty I hope some of you try painting a garden on your nails, it certainly is fun!