Penitent in the Night nails tutorial

Our inspiration today comes from what in Spain we call the Holy Week. If you can't tell by the name, it's a festivity that lasts for a week and it's Catholic in origins and executions. In several cities, big sculptures are transported publicly as an act of devotion, and we call this act a procession. Not only the people actively carrying the five hundred year old ornate wooden figures, that are also delightfully decorated with hand-embroidered fabrics each year, walk along. Lots of these people are dressed in a very particular way and are called penitents. You might have seen a fantasy representation of this in the game Blasphemous, as your main character emulates that dress, but one of the main focal points is a tall and pointy head piece called capirote.

That was what I tried to emulate today, a capirote going along in the darkest night.

You don't even need the backstory and you can do this in any combination of colours that you want, but I went with these shades in particular:

These are the only polishes I used, aside from the base and top coats:

• Holo Taco's Green Taffy
• Holo Taco's One Coat Black
• Holo Taco's Reflective Taco

I also used triangular nail vinyls, so that's all you need for this. You can see how simple it can be with the correct materials:

We start painting with the shade that our capirote is going to be, in my case, Green Taffy. We want this to be opaque, and apply a quick dry top coat to seal it in and rest assured our nail vinyl won't rip off this so far, so be patient and wait around 15 to 20 minutes if your top coat actually dries quite quick. I used Seche Vite and those times worked perfectly for me, if you want a reference. I know Seche Vite has shrinkage problems on lots of people but, weirdly enough, not on me. And I say that because I switched from my previous holy grial of a top coat because of the shrinkage. I guess different strokes for different folks, right? Specially of nail polish.

Now that I've made that paragraph long enough for you to let your top coat dry, because obviously you're doing this in real time with me, apply your top coat. I applied mine in the example from the free edge of this swatch stick for ease for the curve:

The nail vinyl barely extends beyond the swatch stick but it is on the longer size. Press it. Firmly, you don't want polish below it! When you're positive you have it properly pressed, paint a coat of the other nail polish, in my case, black, and peel the vinyl immediately. You will want this second polish to be quite opaque, in order to achieve this step properly. One Coat Black is that girl for me.

Correct the lines if you need with your clean up brush and a tiny bit of acetone. Don't worry, your base colour is protected by a layer of top coat so if your brush is not dripping wet, you won't mess it up. I needed to do it because the vinyls I used weren't the best, but those were the triangles I had to my disposal. You can also use two straight lines, even with striping tape, if you are amazing controlling your brush to not overstep to the other side while doing it quick enough to not let the polish dry. I'm not good enough, I'll restrain from that.

Up until this point it has been a very basic "use a nail vinyl" tutorial, and, honestly, it doesn't have much more. For the stars, I wanted them to be extra twinkly, so I opted for using reflective glitter instead of holografic. I also knew I wanted to play with matte top coat, so the choice was made already.

 

This picture is it after applying a coat of Reflective Taco and another coat of quick dry top coat. Taking the pictures let it dry enough time to be safe to apply a final coat of matte top coat, but the one I used was very bad so I needed to overcorrect and it messed up a bit the shape in the final picture. I'm a bit disappointed by that, but show must go on!

 

The matte top coat still allows the reflective glitters to shine, specially under a flash, and still gives the twinkle effect. And now, let's adress the elephant in the room. If I knew I wanted to use a matte top coat, why did I choose a linear holographic? Well, the answer is simple: I am a nail criminal. But in all seriousness, a linear holo with a matte top coat has a visual texture that reminds me of soft velvet, the material capirotes are made of. I let real life inform my nail art. What is this, using references?

This would be the end, but I have sad news: I broke a nail. Again. This time, I could save the length via careful reshaping and dropping the soft square nails towards rounder, oval nails. Why do I tell you this? Because I was actually planning on doing this on my actual real nails for the week. Which is kinda blasphemous in itself as I'm a guy that paints his nails and the community around this is quite traditional, but see if I care for what they think of me painting my nails:

 

In order, you have a picture of them glossy, glossy with flash, matte and matte with flash. The effect looks quite different. Also, if you're eagle eyed, yes, I did the penitents coming from my cuticle on my nails. I planned on doing it like this on myself.

This is actually the end of this blog post. As the publication date of this post, it's the official first day of this Holy Week and it will continue until next Sunday, but for that day I will have something unrelated to that celebration. Join me to see what else could I do on nails and don't forget to tell me what you'd like to view from me or show me if I inspired you to do some specific nail art!