Beauty and the Beast Stained Glass Nails (with Pictorial)

Hello friends! Have any of you seen the live-action Beauty and the Beast movie yet? They trailers look so amazing and Emma Watson is as gorgeous as always. Maybe I'll take some time to go see it this week. Despite not having seen the movie yet, my nails this week are inspired by it (but maybe moreso the original Disney animation). I've only ever seen the animation two or three times, but I absolutely loved the sound track! "Tale as Old as Time" is such a wonderful song and it makes me feel all warm and tingly inside when I listen to it.

 

This week's nail art did involve a bit of experimentation since it was my first time attempting to create a stained-glass look. I used a glittery base polish with translucent colors on top. The results were not quite what I expected but I think they turned out quite nice, since the sheer layers of paint allowed some glitter flakes to shine through. It took me a while to nail down what design I wanted though, as there were so many cute characters in the movie. In the end, I kept my nails relatively simple using different parts of the stained glass from the movie. On my thumb is the beautiful rose, while on the rest of my fingers I incorperated the wall-climbing roses from the bottom left of the stained glass with the pattern of Belle's dress. 

Anyway, here are my tips, tricks, more pictures and a pictorial of how I did these nails....

• (Optional) Start off by painting your nails with a white/silver glittery base color (I used one thin coat of Sally Hansen's Diamonds), this will give your design a more shiny and glass like appearance
• Use a very thin paint brush and draw on the rose as shown with black acrylic paint. Ensure that your lines are thin.
• reference pictures will help with this
• in order to keep your lines thin, remember to clean your brush frequently!
• Draw on the stem and leaves of the rose in a similar manner
• Add in the space filling lines in the background (make sure that these lines are straight, but very the angles at which they intersect)
• Fill in your design
• dilute your acrylic paints with water and fill in the shapes on your nail, the diluted paint will help the design achieve a more 'glass-like' appearance
• you can build up color by layering the color
• using different shades of colours will give the design more dimension
• Once you are satisfied with the colours, go back in with the back acrylic paint and trace over some of the black outlines
• Go over your design with a shiny topcoat to seal it in

And it's as easy as that! Use the design as an accent nail or use the same techniques to create other stained-glass looks.