Originally posted on December 1st, 2019.
I want you, I want you, want you 👀
EXO is back! Even though we were completely robbed of seeing X-Xiumin, X-Lay, and X-DO, EXO still killed it with this album's 6 member lineup.
Even though I obviously missed hearing Minseok, Kyungsoo, and Yixing's voices in OBSESSION, EXO still delivered a really solid album and concept. The whole evil clones thing was really cool, and I think the promotion around it (like the @onearewe.exo accounts) was pretty ingenious. As for the album itself, I loved all the tracks but I think my favourite b-sides were Non Stop and Trouble. They weren't immediate favourites mind you - Trouble took a while to get used to because of it's experimental melody, and I honestly did a double take the first time I heard Non Stop, wondering why EXO was doing that style of song. Needless to say they both grew on me!
It's been a while since I painted this design, but if I remember correctly I had a bit of a hard time coming up with a cohesive theme for this set. I knew that I wanted to use the album logo for the thumb, but everything else was kind of up in the air. The EXO/X-EXO logo made sense to me, so that brought me back to, once again, focusing on a black/white/red colour scheme for an exo design (this seems to be a reoccurring theme for them).
I thought the black and white chess pieces would kind of embody the fight going on between the exos and their clones, and it fit the colour scheme nicely as well. Fun fact, I had originally painted the background of that nail solid red, but it looked too plain so I made the chessboard look after the fact by adding the darker red sections.
Since the logo SM gave us this time was comparatively easy (I'm looking at you, Love Shot logo), I made this design difficult to paint all on my own by deciding to try to recreate X-Sehun's eye makeup on the index nail. I did have an easier alternative, which was a wound look with fake piercings, but Joanne (my friend and part-time creative assistant) said that that look was too similar to my Monster design, so I went with the eye makeup. With how hard eyes can be to paint and how unsure I am about shading with colours, I'm actually super surprised and happy with how well this nail turned out. I spent a lot of time on it, and I think it paid off, with the eye actually looking kind of 3D!
After locking down the other nails, the pinky was kind of a wild card. I ended up going with the burning Earth from the last few seconds of the music video: the blue of the water brings out the blue of the eye on the index nail, and the yellow/orange kind of go with the beige/red from the other nails.
As I was writing some posts for the blog, I also realized that this design is the 100th kpop design in my Comeback Series (and it's also my 35th EXO design)! This series doesn’t include any of my concert nails or designs that aren’t directly inspired by music videos, so technically I’ve done over a hundred kpop designs now, but I was really excited to see that I’d finally reached this milestone after almost 7 years! To celebrate, I’ve decided to finally put together a master post of all my kpop nails so you can find them all in one place; you can find it here (heads up though, since there are so many designs, it is a pretty image heavy page)!
While putting together those master posts, I also happened to stumble upon the first and most recent times I tried to pain one of the exos' eyes. The first time was all the way back in 2013 when I used Luhan's eye from the Wolf Drama ver. music video as reference, and the most recent time (as a follower reminded me) was for Love Shot when I painted Xiumin's eye. Below is a kind of then-and-now comparison; it's always cool being able to see the improvement over the years!
If you want to try this design out for yourself you can check out the tutorial on my Youtube channel below. Please remember to tag me (@nyanails or #looknyanails) on Instagram if you recreate this design so that I can see them!
Enjoy!
Products Used:
Butter London - Mink Grey
Butter London - Priming Base Coat
China Glaze - Campfired Up!
China Glaze - Saved by the Bluebell
CND - Tangerine Rush
CND - Teal the Wee Hours
CND - Unearthed
CND - Vinylux Topcoat
Essie - Licorice
Essie - Mixtaupe
Essie - Topless & Barefoot
Essie - Waltz
OPI - Chromatic Orange
OPI - My Vampire is Buff
OPI - Primarily Yellow
OPI - Push and Shove
Sally Hansen - Barracuda
Sally Hansen - Grey-Dreaming
Sally Hansen - Greyfitti
Sally Hansen - Red Carpet
Sally Hansen - Slate-r Girl
Sally Hansen - White On
xo,
Becca.
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