By now pretty much everyone has seen the cute YouTube clip of a baby panda sneezing. Awww!

And most people should know that the panda is an endangered species. If not for conservation efforts, this beautiful creature might cease to exist.

To help raise wildlife awareness, I decided to create Panda Nails this time. Hope you like it.

Surprisingly, this nail art doesn’t involve a lot of tools. In fact, I used the regular nail-polish brush for all of it except for the eyes and paws – used a dotting tool for that.

It also only uses 3 colors – black, white, and green, so hopefully you’ll find it easier to replicate than, say, The Grapes of Wrath Nails that I did earlier.

Let me know what you think and if there are any other animals you’d like to see me try to paint. I’m not a good artist, but I’m always willing to try. Effort is worth a lot.

P.S. I just thought that you could try doing this in primary colors and they’d look like gummy bears!

Panda Nail Art Pictures

All swatches have:

• 1 coat of Orly Bonder Rubberized Basecoat
• 1 coat of Seche Vite Dry Fast Top Coat
• Background: Sephora by OPI Caught With My Khakis Down
• Head, Body, Eye & Paw: OPI Alpine Snow
• Ear, Mouth, Arm, Leg & Eye: China Glaze Liquid Leather

For reviews and/or swatches of specific products, please click on the above links.

What I Used:

1. Orly Bonder Rubberized Basecoat
2. Seche Vite Dry Fast Top Coat
3. OPI Alpine Snow
4. Sephora by OPI Caught With My Khakis Down
5. China Glaze Liquid Leather
6. Dotting tool
7. Piece of foil

Step 1: Choose your colors & get all your supplies ready

Unscrew the caps of the bottles. Have everything ready to go and easily accessible. When your nails are wet, you definitely don’t want to be struggling to open bottles.

Step 2: Paint your nails the base color

I opted for a khaki green (Sephora by OPI Caught With My Khakis Down). In the photos with flash, it looks like gray, but in real life it’s definitely a fatigue green with a hint of gray. (The swatches above in sunlight are more color-accurate.)

Obviously, you can choose whatever color you’d like as the background, but I wanted a nature theme, so green seemed to be just right for that.

Wait for this to dry a bit (about 10 minutes) before continuing onto the next step.

Quickie Sephora by OPI Caught With My Khakis Down Review

Application was superb – flowed on the nail smoothly and evenly. Even with the first coat, it was very pigmented. This formula is wonderful!

To read my in-depth review and to see lots of swatches of this color by itself, please click here.

Step 3: Paint the head

Using the brush from your white-creme polish (I used OPI Alpine Snow), create a small circle near the top of each nail.

I found that the easiest way to do this is to dot and dab on the polish instead of traditionally painting it on. You’ll get a better circle this way. Plus the dot-and-dab method seems to concentrate the color and make it more opaque, which is what you want.

Don’t worry too much about it looking messy. I actually think the messiness makes it look ‘furry’, and I dig that.

Step 4: Paint the body

Using the same method above, add a larger circle underneath each of the small ones you just created. Make sure that they touch or its head will seem to be floating above its body and we don’t want that! 😛

You’ll have something that looks like a fuzzy baby snowman.

Wait for this to dry a bit (about 10 minutes) before continuing to the next step or the colors could bleed.

Step 5: Add the ears

Using your black-creme polish (I used China Glaze Liquid Leather), add two dots on top of the small white circle.

I was going to use the handle of a nail-art brush as a makeshift large dotting tool, but forgot to do it! 😛 So I ended up just using the regular China Glaze brush to blob on the dots. Oh well…

Step 6: Start the eyes

Put some black nail polish onto your piece of foil and dip your dotting tool into it. Add a pair of eyes to each nail.

Since I had a really small dotting tool only, I had to actually add 2 dots to make each eye bigger.

Step 7: Paint the mouth

You could make them smile or gawk. Just do whatever makes you happy. I used my dotting tool to add the mouth. I tried not to make it a dot like the eyes.

Step 8: Draw the arms

Using the brush from your black polish, use a delicate dotting and dabbing motion to add the arms. I positioned the arms inward to emphasize the cute chubbiness of the panda. Of course, you could make your pandas get funky and put their arms in the air and wave ’em all around like they just don’t care! 😛

Step 9: Add legs

Using the same method as the previous step, add the legs. If you want, you can leave the legs like this. I, however, wanted to emphasize the paws, so I continued. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out too well, and I should’ve stopped here. Haha!

Step 10: Add whites to the eyes & add paws

Put some white polish onto your piece of foil. Then dip your dotting tool into it. Add the whites on top of the black eye circles you made earlier. Add a large dot and then some small ones at the bottom of the legs. (See, the paws didn’t turn out well! Haha! It’s the thought that counts, right? Right? 😛 I also added more white to the neck of one pandas.)

Step 11: Add more black to connect the paws to the legs

Since it looked like the toes were floating, I decided to go back in with my dotting tool (dipped in black) to fill in the area around the toes.

Step 12: Add a top coat

Make sure you wait for the polish to dry a little (about 10-15 minutes) before you go slicking on the top coat. If you don’t, you could smear your design.

Step 13: Read about endangered species and consider donating to wildlife-conservation organizations

Would you try panda nail art? Isn’t it weird how even though pandas seem so calm and gentle, they can actually be really violent? Do you or have you donated to any wildlife-conservation causes?

In case you wanted to see the baby panda sneezing, here’s the YouTube clip.