Fan Brush Nail Art

Base color: Sally Hansen Whirlwind White (2 coats)
Purple acrylic paint


I did this design using a fan brush. This is the YouTube tutorial I watched by SimpleNailArtDesigns. 

This was my first time ever trying to use acrylic paint on my nails. I bought the paint MONTHS ago but just never got around to using it. I'm kind of a perfectionist sometimes so I was worried I would spend all day trying to use the acrylic paint and just redoing my nails over and over again because they wouldn't look right on the first try. 

Using acrylic paint over nail polish turned out to be really forgiving! Once the base nail polish is dry, you can paint over it with acrylic paint and then just wash off the acrylic paint with warm water if you don't like it! You might need to rub gently to get it off but it comes off pretty easily, leaving your nail polish base behind. It's so awesome! It's like making your nails into little whiteboards :) The only problem was that I kept wanting to re-do only one nail, so I had to keep dragging my boyfriend over to wash my nails for me lol. Poor guy but I didn't want to accidentally wash off any of the other nails that I liked. Once you're happy with the way it looks seal it in with topcoat so it doesn't wash off. I think I missed a few spots when I was going over it with topcoat. The sides of my right index and thumb are particularly bad. There's so much white edge! Oops :( I also accidentally smeared my left index finger when I was applying topcoat. I actually really like the effect though... a really nice random messy pattern. 

I only ended up using one color of acrylic paint for these. Usually when I see these manis people do 2-3 colors over their base color but when I tried to do multiple colors they blended together. Since the paints were more like "jelly" nail polish than opaque cremes the colors just layered and created a muddy look rather than looking like overlapping stripes. The paint just kind of ran everywhere instead of creating dragged looking lines. This mani from Sweet Sugar Nails is what I was trying to go for. I think I bought the wrong acrylic paint because mine seems way more watery than what I see people using in YouTube tutorials. The acrylic paint that I bought is from the brand "Americana" and is labeled "Gloss Enamel" acrylic (I bought it at Michael's). I guess that might explain the difference? I didn't even notice that it said "Gloss Enamel" on it when I bought it. I just got this pack because it was cheap and had tiny pots of lots of colors so I wouldn't need to bother mixing them. Silly me! :p Oh well maybe I'll go buy normal acrylic paint lol... and find some other use for these.