A wedding is one of the most important days in a person’s life. Nails for the bride are often clean and simple — mostly French — but they are always what the bride wants. Weddings are not always your traditional church going affairs. Couples are branching out with uncommon venues, personalization that reflects the story of the happy couple and use of color. Sometimes, there is a strong use of color, which is our focus. We will be creating a watercolor effect using soft colored a floral stamping design and markers.
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A wedding is one of the most important days in a person’s life. Nails for the bride are often clean and simple — mostly French — but they are always what the bride wants. Weddings are not always your traditional church going affairs. Couples are branching out with uncommon venues, personalization that reflects the story of the happy couple and use of color. Sometimes, there is a strong use of color, which is our focus. We will be creating a watercolor effect using soft colored a floral stamping design and markers.
The Bridal Style
Many brides today are using blush pinks, baby blues, black, red and even prints. Wedding dresses have become limitless due to the bride’s imagination and creativity. There are many different variations a bride can choose from.
When creating a set of wedding nails, it is best to draw inspiration from the wedding dress. You can pick out just one aspect of the bride's dress, or you can try to incorporate as many elements as possible. All of this, of course, depends on your consultation with your bride. I strongly recommend doing this about a month in advance, so you can do some test nails and discuss the likes and dislikes with your client. It is important to keep in communication with the bride as you develop your bridal scheme. 
This particular bride is embracing flowers and light spring time colors for everything. Flowers will be everywhere: on the cake, for the tablescapes, her dress and many other places — of course we have to do flowers with her nails. For this tutorial, we are going to use a very easy technique that incorporates floral stamps and easily attainable markers. We will be dotting the floral images with the markers.
How-To: Bridal Watercolor
- Firstly, prep the nail as you would for any gel service.
- The nail bed color you choose should be sheer to a pastel color. The lighter the shade, the more of a contrast for the art. It’s important not to go too dark for the nail plate, as the effect will be lost and will not read well.
- Next, wipe the nail with alcohol. At this time, you can add a top coat if you wish, but I like to avoid this so that the nail does not get too thick.
- Now choose your image. For this technique, you would like a flower image that is fairly open and does not have too much small detail. It is totally fine if you have a little since you are going to color over it anyway. A larger image will give more room for variation of color. In this way, you would get a more watercolor effect. Once you have decided on the image, stamp the image onto the nail, making sure you have a nice clean pick up. I prefer to use transparent tape to make sure that only the clean image is on the stamper head. When working with stamps, you need to move quickly or the transfer image may not be whole. It is the outline of the image that is going to be very important.
- Next, choose the colors you will be working with. Please note that not all colors bleed well or are not very visible. For this technique, we are wanting the colors to bleed. Additionally, yellows and light pinks are very faint and often need to be applied more than once, whereas purples and blues are very strong and bleed a lot. These colors should be used sparingly since a little dot goes a long way, while using a couple shades of greens within the same leaf provides a painterly effect.
- Now that you have the nail painted, stamp outline on and colors chosen, it is time to move on dotting in the flowers with the markers. Simply dot the colors where you would like them on the individual petals and leaves. Be mindful of what you see in nature. The bolder colors are most often closer to the center of the flower, so place the stronger color dots there.
- Next, take a very fine brush, dip it in alcohol and then pat onto the dots of Sharpie. You will see the colors start to run and bleed into each other. Using your little brush, control the bleed and fading around the petal until you reach your desired effect. Don’t worry if it faded too much. You can always apply more once the alcohol has evaporated. Continue this process until you are satisfied with the results. Let the nail air dry for a few moments.
- Carefully float your top coat over the watercolor masterpiece, being careful not to brush over too many times or you could get smears and ruin your hard work.
- After you top coat, you can apply some gel paint to accent the flowers, leaves or stems.
- Lastly, top coat again to finish the nail. That is all there is to it. This design is very simple, really pretty and relatively easy to do. It is a wonderful option for the bride who wants something a bit more colorful for their special day.
About the Author:
Kelli Davis is a licensed nail technician for Eurotan in Bakersfield, California. Davis was the winner of the 2023 Nailpro Master Challenge Fancy French competition.
