Muppets Most Wanted Nail Art

Like every true '80s child, I love the Muppets. I grew up watching reruns of The Muppet Show (I'm just a little too young to have seen the original airings, but not by much!), and even now, I always get excited when a new Muppet movie gets released. So when I started seeing trailers for the upcoming "Muppets Most Wanted" movie, I knew I had to do some nail art to celebrate the occasion.

At first glance, I know this may not seem like the most Muppet-y manicure ever, but bear with me! I'm not really enough of an artist yet to hand-paint cute little Muppet faces on my nails, so I decided to match the characters' outfits (and the movie's logo, in Kermit's case) in this image instead:

Wallpaper by stuartreeves.com and characters ©Disney

I really admire other nail artists' abilities to do super detailed, hand-painted nail art for movies and other events, but I know I'm just not quite there yet. So my goal with this design was to capture the fun, colorful look & feel of the movie using techniques that are generally pretty doable for someone without a lot of amazing art skills (like me!). I feel like I succeeded—at least, I hope I did!

Read on for more details and lots more pictures!


Writing a complete rundown of how I did each nail might take forever (and I'm not sure if people are even that interested in hearing about it?), so how about I just list all the polishes & materials I used and call it good? :) If you're curious about a particular nail or technique, please feel free to hit me up in the comments and I'll be more than happy to explain further. I can tell you right off the bat that in addition to the polishes and a very small bit of acrylic paint, the only tools I used were some scotch tape, a dotting tool, a small nail art brush, and a Q-tip.

Base colors:

• NARS Galathee
• Zoya Purity
• OPI My Vampire Is Buff
• Sinful Shine Bananappeal

Other colors used for details:

• Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure Red My Lips
• Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure Punch Drunk
• Essie Bahama Mama
• Picture Polish O'Hara
• Zoya Claudine
• Zoya Pixie Dust Chyna
• Zoya Pixie Dust Tomoko
• OPI Kyoto Pearl
• Sephora by OPI I Come in Peas
• Sephora by OPI It's Totally Karma
• White acrylic paint

I like a lot of these nails individually and would probably wear a whole manicure of most of them, but I think my very favorite is the argyle Gonzo nail. That one took me the longest to figure out how to execute just right and I even had to redo it once or twice (ahem), but I'm extremely happy with the way it turned out in the end!

And finally, here's a combo image of the manicure and inspiration, because I know it's always nice to have one graphic that puts everything together for easy reference:

Since this is one of my more out-of-the-box manicures, I'd really love to know what you think!

Thanks for looking!