Hi everyone!
Thanks for joining me!
Have you ever wanted to customize your SD, but you just weren’t confident in your painting skills? Have you maybe wanted to add a personal touch to a doll, but didn’t want to repaint them completely? If this sounds like you, you might want to try painting your SD’s nails.
Painting a doll’s nails is a great personal and realistic touch. You can do fun colors, or give them natural shading. You can use paint or pastels, or both! It’s also much simpler than repainting your doll’s face, and if you make a mistake you can just wipe it and start over without having invested too much time in it.
Today I’m going to walk you through the steps of this process in this beginner level tutorial. Let’s get started, shall we?
Everything you need!
Above, I have all of the supplies you will need for this, laid out simply.
-Your doll’s hands
-Acrylic paints in the color of your choice (I am using the ZM Basic Set)
-Acrylic Gloss (I am using Tamiya- X-22Acrylic Clear)
-A brush (I am using ZM Special Brush 05)
-Paper Palette or other palette of your choice.
-Some water (I am using a Mr. Paint Tray, but any small dish or cup will work.)
-A tissue or paper towel (This is for cleanup and for blotting excess paint. Since this is a small job you shouldn’t need much, but feel free to use what you feel you need.)
Optional:
-Pastels (If you want a more naturally shaded look pastels would be great. We are not going over these techniques in this tutorial, but basic pastels techniques have been covered in previous tutorials. Drop me a line at service@volksusa.com if you want to see a pastel nails tutorial! If enough people are interested I’ll do one.)
-ZM Finishing Powder Spray or MSC UV-Cut/Flat (If using pastels, or if you want to seal your work.)
-Thinner for gloss (X-20A)
Choose your colors.
Step 1: Prepare your paint.
The first thing you’ll want to do is to choose what colors you want to paint the nails. You can paint them any color you like!
I wanted to do some punky and fun, but still kinda cute, so I chose to paint the nails black and pink. Therefore I need black, red, white, and the thinner from my set.
My palette setup.
I recommend separating your colors pretty far and using very small amounts. For any doll painting you only need a little bit of paint and for something this small it is even more true. If it dries out you can always mix more. You can see my black, red, white, and my thinner here.
Mixed colors.
The paint on the left is black, but after mixing it with the thinner it was catching the light really well. Please ignore the fact that it doesn’t look black.
For the black, you can mix it with the thinner until you get a good consistency. You want it to be thin enough so that it goes on smoothly, but not so thin that it will run or bead up.
For the pink, I needed to mix the red and white. I did this while simultaneously mixing the paint with the thinner until I reached the color and consistency I needed.
First layer.
Step 2: Lay down your first coat.
If you lay down thin, light coats of paint the overall end result will be smoother than if you try to paint it all at one time. The paint will also dry faster, and you will be able to fix your mistakes more easily.
1st layer finished.
You can see that the first coat looks patchy and uneven, but you’re going to go over it again so don’t worry about it.
For this effect, I painted all of the black nails first and then moved to the pink nails. This saves you some time and effort as you can paint more continuously and you don’t have to wash your brush quite so often.
Make sure that you wash your brush well in between colors and while your paint is drying. Since I am doing two different colors for the nails I didn’t want them getting mixed up.
If you’re only doing one color it’s still important to wash your brush occasionally. If you’re having trouble with the paint being difficult to apply smoothly, or nothing is coming off of the brush, wash it gently in the water you prepared. Wash your brush well and often for the very best results!
2nd layer started.
Step 3: Layer it up.
If the picture above I am laying down another thin coat of paint over the top of what is there.
See the difference?
In this picture you can clearly see the difference between the hand that has one coat and the hand that has two. The colors are looking more vibrant and smooth now, aren’t they?
After doing a second coat on both hands my colors dried up and I had to mix some more. I still only put down a little bit of paint. Since I felt like the pink I was using was a little too light I mixed a little more red in it for the last coat.
Oopsie!
Detour: Fixing your mistakes!
I don’t know if you can see from the picture, but I messed up when painting the last coat of black on this hand. My hand slipped and I got a line of paint on his thumb! :(
Something like this is easily fixed though. I’ll tell you how!
The first thing you will do is grab your tissue or paper towel. A cotton swab would work great for this as well.
Now, dab a little bit of acrylic thinner on there. If you’re using the ZM paint sets you can just use the same stuff that came in the set. Be careful not to use too much.
Rub, rub.
Rub the affected area gently. Make sure you don’t get the thinner on the parts you don’t want removed. (This is why I recommended the cotton swabs. If you’re not confident with delicate areas they are really helpful. The Mr. Cotton Swabs are tiny and great for stuff like this. I use them all the time!)
All clean.
Tada! It came right off and now I can go back to what I was doing. It took longer to write about removing the mistake than it did to actually remove it!
Painting Finished!
Step 4: Finishing.
After you get your painting done you can seal the hands if you would like. I chose not to since I will be adding gloss to the nails and that will protect the paint in much the same manner.
Make sure the nails are completely dry before sealing or glossing them.
Time for gloss.
Make sure you are using a clean, basically dry brush to do this step! If you want to you can transfer the gloss from the pot to the palette, but I find it simplest to just dip my clean brush into the gloss.
The reason why you want to use a clean brush is because you do not want to get paint in your transparent gloss. It will make it cloudy and it will lose some of it’s transparency.
Glassy gloss.
Can you tell the difference between the glossed and not glossed fingertips? Maybe not, it’s not the best picture. Sorry about that!
Anyway, once again you will want to use light coats of paint, for the same reasons as before.
One coat of gloss will give you a nice sheen, a semi-gloss. Two or three coats of gloss with give them lots of sparkling shine!
At this point you could also do something fun, like mix a bit of Shine Pearl in with the gloss for some sparkling color.
Finished!
All done!
I really hope you enjoyed my tutorial and that you will try it yourself!
As always, please direct any questions to service@volksusa.com!
~Bailey
Tags: Tutorials
