Bridal Mehndi Designs – Wedding Henna for Hands and Feet – Grooms too!
Wedding & Party Guest Henna Designs
These designs take 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or 20 minutes each to complete. They allow Heather to
All of Heather’s Henna in no particular order
Including many of the henna designs above and all Heather’s other mehndi work, too! You will find:
- Prenatal Pregnant Belly Henna
- Menna aka Henna for Men
- Henna designs for other areas of the body
- back henna designs
- hand henna designs
- foot henna designs
- …and more
Heather Caunt-Nulton is Boston’s premier mehndi artist specializing in a wide range of traditional henna design styles. These include Indian bridal mehndi, North African (Moroccan, Mauritanian, Sudanese) henna, as well as her signature Dushanbe and Rococo styles.
@hennabyheather – instagram – pinterest
You can find my most recent work on my Instagram. Over on Pinterest, you can see what other people are enjoying these days.
Speaking of Pinterest -brides, it’s a great idea to make a public board of mehndi designs you love. You can then make your board public and share the link to it in your wedding henna booking inquiry!
Please do give me a follow, and feel free to drop me a DM.
Like the Bridal mehndi, Sangeet / Wedding Guest Henna, and party / Festival designs you see here?
I am happy to travel ANYWHERE to do henna for your wedding!
And if you’re in New England (MA, RI, CT), you can swing by one of the festivals I’m working at or book a private event.
About Heather’s Henna Design Philosophy
Honoring Artistic Lineage
My own personal henna style is deeply rooted in the work of master henna artists. I have taken inspiration from artists around the globe since I first started pursuing this artform. Acknowleding that no artist creates in a vacuum, and honoring the hard work of those who have come before us and set us up for success, is immensely important. I am deeply grateful to Sumita Batra, Loretta Roome, Catherine Cartwright-Jones, Neeta Sharma, Lezard Cheung, Bhavini Gheravara, and so many others for sharing their henna artistry with the world when I was first learning in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. The impact these artists’ work has had on my own cannot be understated. I did many masterwork copies, and many drills based on the elements these artists use, until I eventually became confident enough to utilize what I learned in my own creative work.
On Inspiration
I take inspiration from the world around me, in all ways. Often it is something that the client themselves is presenting to me. Sometimes by intentionally making a direct request. Other times, they sending a message via their personal choices and self-presentation. Often, I am inspired by pop culture. A meme, a trend, or a song running through my head. Of course, I also take inspiration from the work of all my henna artist contemporaries. I am grateful to my fellow artists who so generously share images of their work with the world.
I also have a tendency to go down deep, deep rabbit holes of personal interests. Something in the world ignites a spark in me, and then it quickly becomes and all-consuming obsession. Some people might throw labels like ADHD and/or autistic onto these tendencies of mine, and more than likely they would not be wrong. But what’s important is that it brings me great joy and satisfaction to delve into topics and areas of culture, especially visual culture. I like to delve so deeply that I can begin to feel like I just might truly understand it enough to begin to use it authentically as a source of inspiration for my own work. And at that point, often, I will put together a design book inspired by these often-years-long obsessive rabbit-hole artistic journeys. Mauritania, Dushanbe, and Rococo Henna are the most notable examples of these. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are my best-loved works – the ones that other henna artists tell me serve them as a source of inspiration for their own work. In this way, I am happy to pass on some of the spark of inspiration to others, to aid in their own creative work.
Intricacy and Time
The pieces I present in the main bridal and festival sections of my portfolio are very intentionally selected to be ones that I feel can be completed in a reasonable amount of time. They therefore represent the level of work my clients can expect from me when hiring me. I have spent my entire henna career learning just what details to keep in, and which to maybe leave out, in order to yield the highest degree of client satisfaction. It is a careful dance that we must dance as professional artists. I believe that all artists should present not only their very best and most impressive masterpieces (typically done in the comfort of their own homes with zero concern for time), but also their more normal day-to-day client work – and we should be honest about the difference.
Often, I am called upon to cover as much skin as I can within a certain timeframe. “Time is money”, or so they say. For those situations, I am content to work quickly, but never sloppily. I like to maintain a certain neatness to my work, regardless of the situation. Clients often comment aloud at their surprise that I am able to maintain clean lines, flowy swirls, leaves, humps, and perfectly spaced dots, even when working so quickly. That is no mistake – the muscle memory, built up over decades, that allows me to accomplish that, is something I can practice at home on my own. I have put in WELL over my Gladwellian 10,000 hours to become a “master” henna artist – I hit that within my first decade. What is unique to each situation is the designs that are created using those basic elements. Some things are close to what I have practiced in the past, and they flow super easily and quickly. This is what people call a henna artist’s “signature style”. Other times, those same well-honed skills are being applied in new-to-me ways, and thus it takes a bit longer.
Intricacy and Time, continued
Of course, I love being able to focus deeply on a new challenge, and/or incredibly intricate work, with no concern for time. Some of my most popular, most likely-to-go-viral-on-the-interwebs pieces, are examples of that. I think it is important that people know that while I am absolutely capable of that level of work, it does take time and intense focus – usually more than is available in a timed appointment with a start and end time. I am more than happy to share how much time any given design I or anyone else has done would actually take me to recreate.
The best thing to do is to have trust in the process. I am always happy to discuss realistically what can be done within the time we have together, and create the absolute best possible design for the current moment we find ourselves in!