Bloody Stitches Halloween Nail Art

 So, I've been reading way too many horror manga recently. I have no idea why, but it's just something I've been drawn to doing. It's been a mistake for a lot of them. However, Tokyo Ghoul isn't that bad. One of the characters stitches red thread all through his skin as a form of body modification and that inspired me to do something kinda gory and stitches related. I've never done something like this before, and not in this amount of detail, either.

This took me way longer than I'd like to admit, and that stems from me screwing up the blood spatter nail a lot. I had no idea what to do there. I'm terrible at doing the whole random organic pattern type of thing.

First, I did four coats of OPI's My Vampire Is Buff. I could've done three, but meh. There were spots that made me not pleased. Just to make it more fleshy and less...whatever the hell you call MVIB, I put a coat of China Glaze's Oxygen over top which is sheer but also fleshy beigey kinda thing. Except on the accent nail. I did only three coats of My Vampire Is Buff, followed by a coat of China Glaze's Don't Let the Dead Bite and finally topped that with Oxygen.

The idea of the accent was to make it look like the glitter was broken blood vessels under the nail. Maybe it worked? Kinda?

My paint palette was broken out then, and I got to acrylic paint mixing. I had four shades of red going for the blood, then I had the annoying as all hell task of making a fleshy colour that matched the base but in different tones. I hated my life extremely doing that. Then I stared at the paint and my nails going, "How the hell do I start this?" I looked up pictures online of how body painters do such things and pulled inspiration from that.

First the basic plain red as a base for the gash, followed by the medium-dark red, then the darkest very brown red to deepen the cut. I added a tiny bit of a light red too just for depth. On the outside of the cuts, I added the lightest beige to make it look raised and tried to blend it out a bit with a shade like the base and some water. Kinda worked. I wanted to do some irritation pink, but I couldn't make my pink on the side of irritated and less...pink. I broke out the dotting tool and used the medium-dark red for holes, and my thinnest striping brush in black for the threads.

Then the blood spatter. I eventually got fed up and watered down my medium-dark red paint and used my "mixing brush" to dab splotches onto the nail. Turns out that was a good idea, since it made areas lighter and darker like actual blood. I wasn't expecting that. All in all, I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out for my first gory-ish manicure. Oh, the polish I'm holding is Don't Let the Dead Bite. You can see it's pretty pink in the base, but that pink is quite sheer.

Happy Pre-Halloween Week!

- Lynni