Alice in Wonderland freehand Nailart

I've got some mojo back, yay!  This is the manicure I wanted to do for the Artsy Wednesday Disney week, but I just couldn't make it work.  I absolutely love the book Alice in Wonderland, and I've wanted to put a representation of it on my nails for a long time.

My favourite character in the book is the Cheshire Cat, so he's the centrepiece of my creation.  One of my favourite quotes from the book is:

Alice "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where –" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"– so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

Simple yet clever.  A sign of great writing, and the book's like that all the way through.

So without further ado, here's what I came up with:

I painted the Cheshire Cat mid-disappear.  I'm not completely heartless though, so gave him a nice branch to sit on.

The playing card characters are actually stickers, which I got from Amazon, here's the (link), and here's what you get:

Some of these are a bit too cutesy for me, and I probably won't use them, but for £3.25 with free shipping, I don't mind that too much.  They are quite thick, and as you can see I had a little bit of wrinkling, but in real life you can hardly tell.

So here's another pic, and then I'll go through what I did:

So, I started off with kitty cat.  I painted my nail with Nails Inc Albert Place, which is one of my go-to light blues.  I then put a coat of Seche on it to dry it quickly. Then I used a silver Sally Hansen nailart pen to sketch out the design.  I like this because it doesn't matter too much if it's not exactly perfect, as you hardly see it at the end. 

Then I drew in the branch with a brown Precision striper, and the leaves with a Color Club green striper.

Then I used my spotter brush and black acrylic paint to place out the mouth and eyes.  Once that was dry I filled in the eyes with green acrylic paint, and made the teeth with white acrylic paint.  Then I filled in his pupils and nmade a little highlight in his eyes, again with acrylic paint.  I then went over the whole thing with a coat of Seche, being VERY careful not to drag the design after all that painting!

The green nails (representing the Queen of Hearts croquet lawn) are one thick coat of Barry M Gelly in Key Lime, and the white nail (as a nod to the White Rabbit) is OPI's My Boyfriend Scales Walls.

A coat of Seche then went over everything to dry it in a reasonable time, and smooth out the stickers.

Here's a close up of my Cheshire Cat nail:

You can just about see the silver pen I used to sketch out the design under his right eye.  In real life it kind of makes it look 3-D, which is pretty cool.

And here's the tools of the trade:

If you haven't read the book, I wholeheartedly recommend that you give it a go, it's a real delight.  And if you do, please let me know what you think of it!

Until next time...

MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~