Nail Art Challenge, Inspired by an Artist - MC Escher

By now a last minute entry for my nail art challenge has become quite the norm, we're almost half way through the challenges actually, so let's just call it nail art challenge Tuesday shall we!

This week was MC Escher, a dutch graphic artist who is a master of perception and perspective manipulation, anybody remember the crazy stair case room at the end of the Labyrinth movie with David Bowie, where Sarah is trying to catch her baby brother, Toby? Well MC Escher is the dude who orginally came up with that crazy stair case idea. If you don't know this artist, google him, his images will blow you away!

Personally, when it comes to perception and perspective I am a disaster. Whenever I draw people I always have to trace the out line from something, otherwise my person ends up with a tiny head, one funny long leg and an arm that wouldn't reach it's own ass, my perspective on proportions is totally warped, and I never notice that I've messed up the proportions until I have finished my piece of whatever art work and take a step back, BAM the person I drew is a freak.

So I wasn't looking forward to this challenge, I knew it was going to be practically impossible to replicate one of his images, and even more so to do something original but inspired by! But I got lucky! I found an image painted by Escher that is very unusual and different from his standard work, this painting is called 'Paradise' and is a depiction of the garden of Eden.

 

This is a large and complicated image and there is no way it was going to fit on my nails. My favourite part is the tree so that had to be included, and I really wanted to paint Adam and Eve, but not being able to trace the bodies onto my nails, poor Adam and Eve ended up looking like mongoloids, so I had to scrap it and think of something, else, and I went for the owl sitting in the tree behind them instead.

So my mani is a bit of a cop out and not what I really wanted to do, but I'm still pretty pleased with the final result and don't think I did too bad of a job!

 

I painted a white base with my Sinful Colours 'Snow Me White' and then painted all the black detail free hand using nail art brushes. The trickiest part was painting the owl over 2 nails and giving him eyes that were visible, but I am supper happy with how the tree leaves turned out especially as I loved that part of the painting the most. Yay for another successful nail art challenge mani!