Tuesday, December 19, 2017

MIC Drop

I was a bit surprised a week or two ago when the views on my BTS DNA tutorial started spiking - the views went from about 15k to 148k over the span of a few days. The spike happened around when BTS was on their American media tour, so I'm assuming youtube promo-ed it because of all the BTS hype at the time. With the spike in views also came a spike in comments, and I had a sudden influx of people requesting a BTS MIC Drop inspired design. Since Big Hit had just dropped the music video for the Steve Aoki Mic Drop remix, I figured it was as good a time as any to tackle the design!




This design is a little bit different from most of the designs in my Comeback Series. All of the designs in this series are based off of a music video, and while this one technically is as well, I deviated quite a bit from the actual mv.

The music video was great, but I wasn't super inspired by any of the scenes design wise, so the only nail that is actually straight from the video is the thumb; I painted that nail using Suga's mic drop at the end of the video as reference. All the other nails have to do with the song, but I took a bit of creative license with them.
Instead of recreating the font used for "MIC Drop" at the end of the video, I created my own and made it flow across the nails as if the letters were made from the cord of the microphone. I really like this aspect of the design and had originally planned to only have these two nails and the thumb as the full design (the other two nails would have had the mic cord running across them as well). I had about 4 different designs half planned in my head though, and that one obviously wasn't what I went with in the end.

The pinky finger design is actually quite close to the bts logo used in the mv, but I decided not to fill it in red since there was no red anywhere else in the design.
The last nail is the trophy nail. I was actually pretty surprised that they didn't show any actual trophies in the music video given the lyrics mentioning that they have too many to count. Regardless, I personally thought that trophies were a focal point for the song, so I wanted one to be included in the design. After looking into the various awards BTS has won and Googling the trophies, I decided to use the statue from the Seoul Music Awards as my reference. I tried to write "SMA" on the little plaque on the statue to identify what awards show it it was from, but the letters were too large width-wise. Instead, I wrote "상" meaning award or prize.




It wasn't very long ago that I was talking about not having painted realistic hands in almost two years, and now here I am painting my second hand in a month. This hand was a little bit easier to paint since I had kind of gotten the hang of shading with polish while painting my Red Velvet Peek-A-Boo design. It was still a bit difficult though, and I did run into some problems with this nail.

Over the years I've become familiar with some of my weaknesses and one that I often talk about in regards to painting is spacing. I sometimes have a hard time judging how centered design elements are, and sometimes make text too large or small for the space. In order to avoid that with this design, I decided to paint the base shape of the microphone first before painting the hand. This sounded like a great idea. In fact, it still sounds like a great idea. However, once I finished painting the mic, I decided that it was, in fact, a bad idea and tried to scrape the silver polish off so that I didn't have to paint the hand over top of the mic. Cue the white polish starting to get torn up with the silver and me sitting at my desk trying to figure out how to salvage it. I ended up filling in what I could with white polish to even the surface out a bit, and then continued on with painting the hand with the mindset that if it was too hard to paint on the uneven surface then I would just start over. Thankfully the painting turned out fine and no restarting was needed!

I did learn from this little mishap though, and switched up my approach to painting this nail in the tutorial below. In the video I start off by painting the grille of the mic but wait until after I've painted the hand to paint the housing of the mic. Hopefully this way will be easier for anyone wanting to recreate this design for themselves!




If you're interested in recreating this design or just want to see the process behind it, I filmed a tutorial for it which you can check out below! If you do recreate this design for yourself please remember to credit me and tag your pics with #looknyanails so that I can see them!



Enjoy!

Products Used:
CND - Clear Topcoat
CND - Leather Satchel
CND - Mystic Chill
Essie - Good as Gold
Essie - Grow Stronger Base Coat
Essie - Licorice
Essie - Master Plan
Essie - Mink Muffs
Essie - Mixtaupe
Joe Fresh - Plaster
Nature Republic - 샤이 옐로우
OPI - My Vampire is Buff
OPI - Push and Shove
Sally Hansen - Eel Skin
Sally Hansen - Seize the Gray
Sally Hansen - White On

xo,
Becca.

No comments:

Post a Comment