Mini Bow Nail Art with Tutorial

Hi guys! I can't believe it's friday already - school half-term holiday has gone so incredibly fast, but it's really cool that the next time we break up, it will be for christmas! I'm so excited for it already haha. Anyway, time to get onto the post.

Today I'm going to give you a tutorial on how to do a cute little bow manicure yourself.
Please bear with me as this is my first attempt at doing a tutorial!

Here you can see the finished product:

Now onto the tutorial! I hope it all makes sense - like I say, bear with me. It's actually a really simple look to achieve.

See steps below that refer to each picture! Enlarge this if you need to.

You will need:
- 2 different coloured nail polishes (here I've used OPI's 'If You Moust You Moust' and Nicole By OPI's 'My Lifesaver'). You could do this with just the one colour but I personally think it looks prettier with two.
- Striper brush with black and white nail polishes / or white and black nail art pens.
- Dotting tool or a toothpick, hair grip etc
(- Base and top coats)

STEP 1) If you're using a base coat, apply it and make sure it's dry. Then move on to paint each nail with 2-3 coats of your chosen polish (obviously this depends on how sheer your polish is).

STEP 2) Once you've made sure the colour is dry, you're ready to start the first step of creating the bow. You need to use your striper brush with white nail polish to make two diagonal lines that cross over each other in the middle. It doesn't matter too much if the lengths are slightly different because this gets tidied up in the next step.

STEP 3) Join up the ends of each line using the striper brush again so you end up with the basic structure of the bow itself.

STEP 4) Fill in the two empty sections using white nail polish. Top tip!: if you find your nail polish brush is a bit too big to do this neatly/without going over the lines, use a dotting tool or something like a toothpick to do it instead :)

STEP 5) Now you need to place a white dot in the middle of the bow using whatever you are using as your dotting tool.

STEP 6) Finally, we're going to outline the bow. For this you can either use the striper brush (if you're feeling brave haha - it can be quite fiddly!), your dotting tool or nail art pen. I used my WAH x Models Own nail art pen in black. Firstly, outline the middle dot/circle. Then do the very edges of the bow. Lastly, make two very small lines coming out of the middle part of the bow to give it depth. Be careful not to make them too long or they won't look as realistic! Make sure everything's dry and then add a top coat if you desire. (Be careful if you've used a nail art pen - I often find they smudge if you don't leave enough drying time or have too much top coat on your brush!)

And that's it! Hope this proved useful to some of you. Don't hesitate to leave me a comment if you have any additional questions or need some tips. I'd also love to see pictures if any of you do try to create this look yourselves :)