I desperately had painter’s block this week when trying to figure out how to do my nails for you guys. I was on my couch, playing the new Pokémon Black Version 2 (Oshawott 4 lyfe), when I glanced over at my little gray cat napping next to me on the couch. “Eureka!” I exclaimed, “I’ll paint your face on my hands!” She perked right up and I took that as confirmation of my decision (but in reality she was probably just nervous because I was shouting at her and she doesn’t speak English). As a bonus, since my cat is a little spooky-looking, these nails can also work for the rapidly-approaching Halloween!

This tutorial involves no fancy stickers, tape, or other bullshit you usually see me using. You will just need a base coat, light color for the background, a cat-face color (I chose gray because Shadow is gray like the O.G. Gandalf), an eye color, black, chunky glitter (optional), and a top coat. I also used dotting tools to make the eyes, but you can use a pen, pencil, or bobby pin to accomplish the same exact things without spending money on an awkwardly specific set of tools.

Feel free to switch this tutorial up in order to paint your own cat’s likeness on your nails. I’ll pray for you if you have a calico, tabby, siamese, and/or longhair cat. For the first step, paint your entire nails the background color. I chose one of my favorite classic french manicure colors, the pinky-white “Ballet Slippers” by Essie.

Grab your cat-face color and swipe the brush across your nail in a slight arc. You can make the cat’s face as big or as small as you like.

Using the same color, draw a triangle on each side of the “head” you just created. These are the ears. In retrospect, I made mine a bit too big and my rendition looks a bit more like Toothless from “How to Train Your Dragon” than my ickle cat.

Dab a couple drops of your eye color polish onto a piece of paper or paper towel. I chose yellow because Shadow has pee-eyes. Pick up your dotting tool (pen, bobby pin, etc.), dip it into the polish, and then dot two eyes onto the face portion. You might want to practice a couple times on your makeshift palette to get the technique down before you dot the polish onto your nail.

Make sure your irises are pretty dry and then repeat this step using the black color to make pupils. You’ll want the black dots to be a tiny bit smaller than the yellow dots and fit inside of them.

Finally, I chose to use chunky glitter to get that creepy-cat reflecto laser-eye look. Pour some of your glitter onto the paper (towel) and, using your dotting tool, pick up individual pieces of glitter and place them in the center of the pupil. Your glitter pieces have to be pretty big and your pupil polish still a bit tacky in order to get this to look right.

Seal it all up with some Seche Vite, clean up the edges, and then you’re done! Let’s see how lifelike they look…

Uncanny! And for the major lolz, let’s have an outtake of Shadow, brimming with fear, after my boyfriend decided to hiss at her in order to get her attention for the picture.

Poor babby. Please comment with suggestions, ideas, and how badly, on a scale of 1-10, you want to see me do Oshawott nails for next Nail Friday.

Written by Taylor Blakin
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