Tutorial for Muted Mondrian Mani

A friend requested a tutorial for my Muted Mondrian Mani. I did my best to recreate it in pictorial form.

This is everything I used for this mani:

From left: Orly Bonder (base coat), Seche Vite (top coat), Essie - Sand Tropez, Zoya - Natty, Hits - Bardana, Nails Inc. - Hampstead Gardens, and Orly Instant Artist in Black. I also have an angled brush from the Bundle Monster brush set, acetone, a small ceramic bowl for the acetone, and an angled E.L.F. brush for clean up.

Start with a clean nail...

Apply basecoat (not shown), let dry, and then apply two coats of your base color. In this case, it's Essie - Sand Tropez.

Next, draw your lines using Orly Instant Artist in black.

However you want it to look will do. If you don't have Orly Instant Artist (or similar nail art polish), I recommend using a striping brush and whatever polish you'd like. The striping brush makes it really easy to make decently straight lines. Here's what the Orly Instant Artist brush looks like (which is what a regular striping brush looks like):

Long and thin brushes make striping pretty easy

Now it's time to begin filling in the rectangles. I put a dab of each color on a piece of paper and then use my angled brush to fill in the rectangle. Use any brush that works for you. It doesn't have to be angled; I'm just feeling fancy. Do your best to stay in the lines, but if you overlap a little, it's okay, we'll fix it later.

Of course, be sure to clean your brush with acetone between each color.

One layer of each color

Add a second layer of the colors to fill in any thin spots if needed...

Lots of overlap on the black rectangle lines

Go over the black rectangle lines with Orly Instant Artist (or equivalent) to crisp up the lines. It's okay if it looks a bit lumpy (like mine).

I like to clean up around the edges before applying top coat. For this, I use an angled eyeshadow brush like this one from E.L.F.:

Apply top coat and everything smooths out and looks miraculously lovely:

Do your other nails and admire your hard work:

Apologies for the crap lighting

Was this tutorial helpful? Questions? Ideas? Comment below and I'll do my best to help! 

Thanks for reading!

All polishes used in this post are my own.