I started this project by drawing out the image that I wanted to turn into string art on paper and coloring it in so I would have a template to work from. I then added grid lines to the drawing as I needed to enlarge the drawing to fit the piece of wood that I wanted to use and knew it would be harder for me to re-draw the image bigger (I’ve never been good at drawing things on a large scale).
Once the grid lines were on my small-sized drawing I drew a larger grid on a sheet of tissue paper and copied over the lines from each square of the grid to get a larger copy of the image.
After I had made my tissue paper stencil I retraced the outlines in marker to make them easier to see and taped the stencil to the piece of wood that I was using. I then placed nails around the outline to get an idea of where the nails should go. On previous attempts at nail art, I had less of a plan and it didn’t work out the best so I figured by placing the nails where I wanted them to go that I could get a feel of the spacing.
Once the nails were all where I wanted them, I removed them one by one and used a punch to make divots where the nails would be going.
Using an actual punch worked significantly better than using a thumb tack (which I’ve tried in the past and do not recommend). The end result was the board you see below with the Samus pattern made out of tons of little indentations.
I then nailed galvanized roofing nails into the divots. This went much easier than in previous attempts since the tips of the nails had a place to sit and the divots helped hold the nails slightly straighter. I was careful not to pound the nails in too deep as I knew I would need enough room on each nail to wrap the string.
I used my original drawing to match up what colored string should go where and tried to outline each section with the color that it would be before filing it in. I did this in an attempt to make the different sections stand out from each other and show off what they were a part of. For the end of the gun I tried to wrap the string around the nails in a diagonal pattern to emphasize that the end of the gun was round and closer than the rest of the gun which was also green. I then made the part of the gun that was on the forearm have straight lines going back towards the back of the gun to differentiate it from the end of the gun. In retrospect I should have done the gun last to help it stand out in front. If you are trying to make a multi colored nail art yourself, I would highly recommend doing all the “background” colors/parts first.
To finish the project up, I went back to re-outline some of the shapes in the image to make them pop. I added more yarn to Samus’s arm to bring it to the front of her body and added a lighter color green to the outline of the gun.
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