31 Day Nail Art Challenge 2.0: Day Eight, Dotticure

Hi everyone! I hope next week to get caught up on this nail art challenge. In the meantime, I have what I hope is a clever take on a dot manicure. For whatever reason, when I brainstormed ideas for this day, I thought of Pac-Man, who is basically a little dot that eats dots. Lol! And since I'm old enough to remember the original Pac-Man, I decided to go retro in trying to recreate the popular game.

Original Pac-Man nail art

About this design:

You're familiar with Pac-Man right?! Right?! If not, here's the basic idea: Pac-Man has to go through the maze, eat all the dots, and try not to die. All the while he's being chased by four ghosty monsters. If he eats all the dots, he goes to the next level. It seems tame now, but this my friends, is the greatest video game of all time.

Original Pac-Man nail art

Original Pac-Man nail art

To get this look:

I decided to create another tutorial for you, I think it's fun to see how a design progresses. Let me know if you find these helpful!

Original Pac-Man nail art

What you'll need:

• Black nail polish
• Acrylic paints in red, yellow, blue, black and white (it also helps if you have two shades of yellow and blue). For my colours, I used: Ultramarine blue, Phthalo blue, Pyrrole red, Hansa yellow, and Indian yellow. 
• A very, very fine detail brush. I used my Pure Color Glamour 1 from Stylish Nail Art on Etsy
• A quick dry top coat and a matte top coat. I used Rica Glossy Glam and Essie Matte About You

Original Pac-Man nail art tutorial

Step-by-Step:

1. Paint your nails with black polish and seal with a quick dry top coat. When dry, sketch in your barriers using blue mixed with white.
2. Refine/go over the barriers
3. Paint in your Pac-Man using yellow plus white. Paint in your monsters: they should be red, pink, cyan and orange.
4. A better look at Pac-Man!
5. Clean up your barriers with black acrylic paint. Also add the jagged bottoms to the monsters.
6. Add your dots! They should be yellow-orange. I used the tip of the brush for these. The dots are harder than they look - you want them to be evenly spaced, and you want a dot to be in the corner of each turn. The trick is to start by placing a dot in the corner first, and work out from there. 
7. Paint in the eyes of your monsters, using larger white dots, then smaller black dots. Bonus points if you can get them to look in different directions!
8. Let acrylic dry, then top with a quick dry top coat and a matte top coat. 

Original Pac-Man nail art

Final thoughts:

This is much harder than it looks. The challenge was to get the maze even on all my nails. In that respect, my ring and pinky turned out the best. On my index and middle, the rows are too wide. But it was fun to do, so I'm not too upset about that!

What do you think of this? Have you ever played Pac-Man?

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