Hello! This is Heather of Henna By Heather, and today I’m going to demonstrate for you a design that’s really simple and quick and elegant and beautiful.

The way that I figured out just how quick this design was:

This week when I was doing a couple of private parties, I started doing this design using a couple elements that I always use – but just repeating them instead of using them as little flourishes. And what happened was everyone *loved* this, when they saw it. And you know how it is at a private party or a festival, once people see a design that they love, then *everyone* wants that design. So that’s how this went. I ended up doing this design or some take off of it for like half of the people at these two different parties that I was doing this week. And at both of those parties, I finished so far ahead of schedule that I was a little worred. Like, “Oh no, I finished so much sooner than I was supposed to. What do I do? I’m getting paid by the hour…” But it ended up working out okay and everyone ended up getting a couple of designs, rather than just the one.

But basically, I figured out that this design is *so* simple and so quick, it’s really the speediest, most people-pleasing design that I have come up with so far. And I think that I should show you guys so you can learn it, because it’s going to be a really great design for you to do at festivals – or at any other situation where you’re charging per henna design rather than by the hour. Of course for private parties you should *always* be charging by the hour. But for things like school fundraisers if you’re doing that to help out your own children or something, or, if it’s for church, or if it’s for… In my situation it’s going to be at festivals where it’s like tens of thousands of people, and you can’t possibly get through hennaing everyone quickly enough.

This is going to be a really gorgeous design, but it still looks on par with designs that you’d normally charge about twenty dollars for – maybe fifteen. But it takes only slightly longer than my five dollar designs, so it’s going to be a really handy tool for you to have in your bag as a professional henna artist – so I hope you enjoy it! Thanks!

—demonstration starts—

Alright, so while we do this design, I’m not really going to talk much, because I just want to speed through it, and show you how fast it can really be. So for just a minute, we’re just going to have a bit of music, and you can just watch how quickly it goes.

It’s basically just swirl, and then a line with a teardrop, and… hopefully the cat does not join us again… Say hello kitty! Moving on… let’s start with the design!

Sorry if that’s off camera at the beginning there. You’ll see that design repeated, this little element repeated, again and again and again, so it will be easy enough to pick up. But it is important to start off to the edge of the hand so it looks really full and complete.

So it’s just a swirl… Like I say, I’m talking, so this is a little slower than the design could really be… But it’s just a swirl, and two lines going around it, little teardrop leafy things at the end, and that’s it!

As you go up the finger, the radius of the curve gets a little smaller maybe. I don’t know if that’s the right term, but it’s not quite as much curvy, it’s a little straighter as you go up the finger, just because there wouldn’t be quite room to keep doing a good job of sweeping all the way around while still trying to have flow and be elegant.

Alright, so there you go! That’s the design. And you can go back, and if you’re feeling like you have a bunch of extra time, add extra little flourishes. But this right here, it takes moments longer than a $5 design, and yet I would feel really comfortable charging $15 for this. And in a very busy festival you could probably even get $20, especially if we add these little dots.

So I often do dots around, further away from the edge, not right on the line like this, but if our key here is speed, if you put them right on the line, you have to think about the placement of them so much less. It’s so much quicker if you do it right up on the line like that. So, if I’m really trying to be fast, I’ll probably do that. Like I said, me talking is making it go a lot more slowly.

If you had still more time, you could add a few flourises in here, and in here. I wouldn’t add them around every single swirl, because it could start to get to be overkill. Although… I guess I’ll show you how that would look, too, so you can decide if you agree or not. But right now it’s just on half of them. And we could also do it on the other side as well. Since I’m trying to hold the camera angle for you, this side is coming out a little more awkward. I’d usually kind of move my hand to the other side while doing this (on myself) but I’m not going to do that to you guys.

And there you go, that is the fancier version of this very simple design.

Now just because…I’m me, and I like to have really pretty henna on all the time, not necessarily $15-$20ish festival henna, I’m gonna go in and add some fingertips now. So you can see how those are. I actually amgoing to move my hand to do those because I realized as I was doing it that it was not the best angle. So we’re doing the same little guy – since this design is really, really based around this, throwing in something else at this point would look kind of weird. I do like to do these little dots going around the nailbed. I thinkt they’re delicate and pretty. This is going a lot slower because it’s being filmed, but you’ll figure that out for yourself. You can go a little faster, for sure.

I guess I should say, I’m focusing so much on the speed of how this is being executed just because it was such a fast design, and that is why I wanted to show it to you. I wanted to show you it really is as fast as I remember. But, I mean, speed isn’t always the number one thing you’re going for, of course. Like, beauty and flow are more important. But our real goal would be to get both. Especially when you’re doing festivals.

So, we could stop here. It’s a pretty good stopping point. I would like to add a little more, though. So I’m just gonna throw in a trail of dots coming down the fingers. Dots make everything better. So at this point, with all of this going on, this is actually really, really easily a $25 design at most of the festivals that I do. With these little fingertips and stuff. So actually to take it from that $15ish probably design to definitely $25 actually doesn’t take too much longer. So it might be worth it for you. I don’t know which way you would want to draw it and present it in your books.

Chances are we’ll draw it up for the ArtisticAdornment.com website – don’t know what the name of that book will be yet. But there are definitely tons of other books for you to look at right now up at ArtisticAdornment.com by myself, Heather Caunt-Nulton, Jamilah Zebarth, and Victoria Welch. Those are our three henna designers right now. And we have some other books in the works – I hope that you guys can check them out as they come out. And if you do want to be updated about when those come out, just add yourself to the email list at http://www.HennaByHeather.com . There’s a thing right on the homepage to add yourself to the email list. Alright – thank you so much and I hope you enjoyed the design…and that it’s useful for you!