Silhouette {Heart} Nail Art Tutorial

My little girl loves to have her nails painted - but what she loves even more is the few times she's actually gone to the salon and they've done a cool design on her nails.  I do not have a steady hand so I'll have no part of that, but I recently saw a really cool idea on Marvelous Mommy. She put mustache nail art on her toes...how freakin' cute!

So for Valentine's Day I thought it would be cool to make some little vinyl Silhouette nail art using hearts!  There are two ways to do this - you can actually use the vinyl as the nail art and keep it on the nail like a sticker or you can use the cut out as a stencil and paint the design on the nail then peel off the vinyl.  It would even be cut to do a combination of both!   Since I didn't have white nail polish on hand, I decided to use the white vinyl as the actual nail design.

First, I created the design in Silhouette.  I had purchased this heart and arrow design set a while back so I just ungrouped it and deleted everything I didn't need.

 

Then I turned the heart so it was right side up (clicking the green circle and dragging) - but you don't need to do that part.   It just makes more sense in my mind when designs are correctly oriented.

 

There's definitely no need to buy a design for this though - the envelope with hearts that comes free with the Silhouette library is perfect to use.  Just select it to bring it into your work area, ungroup it, delete the envelope and hearts you don't need and resize the heart nail art.

Once I had my single heart sized correctly, I duplicated the image (right click > duplicate) so all the hearts were the exact same size.  My images measured .29" x .275"...yup, they are teeny tiny!

 

Then I sent the file to cut.  If you need a refresher on cutting vinyl on the Silhouette click here for the 101 course. 

While the file was cutting, I painted my daughter's finger and toe nails  pink.   Once they were dry, I used the my silhouette scraper to carefully move the hearts from the vinyl backing to her tiny nails.

 

In hindsight I could have actually made the hearts even smaller.
They only fit on her ring finger and thumb and her big toe.
The size I made would have been perfect for me, though! 

I would recommend painting a clear coat over the vinyl to make sure it doesn't peel up.

She loves her little Valentine's Day nail art..and I'm loving that the Silhouette made nail art so easy! 

Thanks for coming to class today at Silhouette School.  If you like what you see, I'd love for you to pin it!