Braainns!

Hello beautiful readers! So... season four of The Walking Dead comes back in... an hour. I must have spent half of today checking my DVR to ensure that the show was recording, and the other half flailing in a pathetic mass of fangirl as I re-watched clips from past episodes online. Pretty productive day,  right? Anyway, I couldn't just watch the show without some nail art to go with it, so today I present to you: Brain nails!

Yeah, I know, this is a pretty strange one. Sometimes I miss the days that I enjoyed painting flowers and bunnies and happy things, but sometimes you need to try something different. At first I was thinking I'd just try to make my nails look like what a zombie's nails would: all dry and torn and bloody and moldy. But that's been done before! I wanted something new. And then I thought, "brains. Brains are new." So... enjoy the brains.

To create this delicious zombie snack on your nails, you'll need:
- base coat
- a plastic bag
- red polish
- white polish
- pink polish
- a medium sized dotting tool
- top coat

This are pretty time-consuming and also take a huge amount of time to dry, so I used the plastic-bag technique to make some decals. If you know what that means, hooray! If you don't, just read on!

Start off by using a Sharpie to sketch out your nail shape onto a plastic bag. Make sure to do it for all ten nails! You can guess how large your nails are, or hold the bag on top of the nail and use it to get a more accurate shape. Make sure to make the drawn nails a bit bigger than your actual nails. 

Fill in the outlines with a beautiful blood-colored red. Don't make this too thin, or the decals won't peel off later, but you don't need to worry about doing multiple coats (if you do too many coats, the decals won't dry, and you don't want that either!). 

Using your dotting tool and white polish, draw out the shape of the brains. I chose to do some random squiggles. You can do random squiggles if you'd like, too, or you can base yours off a picture of a real brain (or off of the design I did on my nails).

Now it's time to make your nails look like brains! Go over the white shapes with pink polish and the dotting tool. Use as much polish as you want to get as much texture as possible. I went over the white with pink twice, but you can do more (or less) than that if you want to. Try to let it dry for a few minutes between each layer.

Oh, and apparently my camera hates brains. I took... well, a lot of pictures, but my camera did NOT want to capture these on my nails. Sigh. These are the best I could get, but I apologize if any are blurry!

Once the decals have dried, it's time to apply them! To remove them from the plastic bag, I like to use cuticle pushers to peel them off. I'm assuming tweezers, or maybe even your nails, would work as well. If they aren't peeling easily, then they haven't dried enough. Wait a half hour or so and try again. 

Paint down a layer of base coat and let dry (you might want to do this at the beginning, but I forgot and ended up doing that part now). Now add a layer of top coat. Let that dry for about thirty seconds, or until it's slightly sticky, and apply the nail decal. Make sure to press it into the nail to really make it stick. 

Add a top coat again to seal the decal in. Try to use a thin layer to avoid losing texture. 

It's time to go over the nails again with one more layer of pink! I also took this opportunity to fill any spots on my nails that the decals didn't cover. I also cleaned up any polish that got onto my cuticles/skin. That's all there is to it!

What do you think of this design? Would you rock these brain nails for Halloween? Are you pumped up for The Walking Dead like I am? Any favorite characters you want to fangirl about? Let me know in the comments! See you all next week!