No matter if you get regular manis at a salon of your choice or paint your nails yourself on a regular basis, at Halloween you may want to spruce up your regular nude or red. You don’t need to be a nail artist to do that! Here’re three easy Halloween nail art tutorials anyone can do – promise! Plus, you’ll have the supplies for each one already at home!
Bloody fingerprints
You’ll need:
- White nail polish
- Red acrylic paint or red nail polish
Prepp your nails with a basecoat (I use Essie’s help me grow). After your base is dry, paint your nails with your white polish. I did two coats for the polish to be opaque and non-streaky (I use essence’s wild white ways).
Dip your finger in the red acrylic paint or nail polish and dab it a few times on a piece of paper or Kleenex. You don’t need much paint to get a nice print. ‘Stamp’ your finger on your nail and go on to the next nail. Repeat. Apply a clear topcoat.
Blood splatter nails
You’ll need:
- White nail polish
- Red acrylic paint or red nail polish
- A plastic straw
- Some old newspapers or kitchen towelettes
Start again with prepping with a base coat and apply your white nail polish, like we did above. Cut your straw in short pieces, about 5cm long. Put a blob of red acrylic paint on a palette (or something with a surface that cleans easily), put one end of the straw in it so there’s some paint on the opening of the straw. Position the straw about 20cms above your nails and blow hard through the straw. Repeat until you’ve a pattern you’re satisfied with.
You can use nail polish for this, but you’ll end with a bigger mess and harder removal. Nail polish also dries much quicker than acrylic paint, so you’ll have to work quicker.
After some dry time, apply topcoat. If you used acrylic paint, you can easily just wash your hands after your topcoat has dried. Or you can leave the red droplets on your hands for an extra gory effect! With nail polish, you either use a lot of tape on your fingers (or some liquid latex) or you’ll have to use a lot of nailpolish remover to remove all polish drops on your hands.
Googly eyes
You’ll need:
- Black nail polish
- White nail polish
- Red nail polish
- A dotting tool, or something with a pointy end to make some dots – a bobby pin, a pin, a ballpoint pen, the end of a skinny brush… endless possibilities!
Start with applying base coat and as many coats of black polish as you need for an opaque and streak-free look. I used essence’s black is back and needed two. Let it dry. Dip your dotting tool into the white polish and start dotting. You want to do pairs of dots that are close together – the eyes. Don’t make too many, you want to have some space left. Into that space goes one (or more) pairs of red dots. Leave it to dry. Now you’ll go in with a smaller dotting tool and dot the pupils into the white and red eyes. For even more fun, let your eyes look in different directions or tell a little story like I did with mine – notice that there’s some kind of invasions of the red ‘monster’ eyes going on on my nails? Let it dry thoroughly and apply your topcoat. Done!
Pro tip: to make your nails look super professional, make sure to clean up any nail polish on your cuticles with a brush dipped in acetone (or nailpolish remover that contains acetone) to get those nice crisp edges.
Easy, right? What are you planning for Halloween? Dress up? Do your nails or makeup in any particular way? Do tell!
