A luxury nail artist rakes in £90k-a-year selling bespoke press-on nails - and spends up to 40 hours painting each set. <br /><br />Maddox McCollough, 27, first started painting nails professionally during the 2020 lockdown. <br /><br />She admits she was "terrible" when she first started - and "couldn’t even draw a straight line".<br /><br />But now, she paints sets commercially for brands like HBO, Burger King and Fox - some costing £6,000 a set. <br /><br />Maddox, from Ashville, North Carolina, US - who is married to Hugo Lam, 29, also a concept artist - said: “You can’t even imagine how weird and wonderful some of the nail art requests get.<br /><br />"I had one woman ask me to paint tiny versions of her Corgi in the style of the anime Naruto. <br /><br />“As soon as I started doing nail art I just fell in love with it. I’d never been exposed to anything like it before.” <br /><br />In 2018, after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, Maddox moved to Berlin, Germany, and took a job at the Isla Berlin nail salon.<br /><br />She had studied a range of art forms in college - including textiles, and industrial knitting - but this was the first time she had tried her hand at painting nails. <br /><br />As a new starter, Maddox had to learn the basics of painting nails - and it took her months of training to feel confident. <br /><br />She said: “I’d never done nails before - this would’ve been three to four years ago and I was terrible when I first started.<br /><br />“I could barely even paint a straight line - the first time I painted a smiley face on a nail it was absolute nightmare.<br /><br />“My hand would be shaking all over the place. <br /><br />"I studied art - I knew how to draw and paint, but this was painting on a flat surface with tiny tools. <br /><br />“It’s way more challenging than anyone would think. <br /><br />"You’ve got to think about cuticle prep, applying the extensions correctly - otherwise these things could distract from your art.”<br /><br />The nail salon shut down in March 2020 - and Maddox was out of a job. <br /><br />She decided to spend her free time practicing art on sets of blank press-ons. <br /><br />She said: “I had a lot of time on my hands - I just practiced the entire time. <br /><br />"I’d watch nail art videos on TikTok thinking: ‘There’s no way I can copy that.’ <br /><br />“But I tried anyway because I thought it would help me improve. <br /><br />“Eventually, I started posting my own videos to TikTok, which is when I started to draw attention from brands.” <br /><br />Maddox’s early videos would gain up to 11k views at a time - and saw her practicing popular designs like Thomas the Tank Engine, Super Mario and Sailor Moon. <br /><br />Progressively, brands started paying her between £3k and £6k to paint promotional designs - her favourite being a Burger King set where each nail had a Whopper painted on it. <br /><br />“A lot of brands look for unique, eye-catching nails,” she added. <br /><br />“Fox asked me to paint characters from Bob’s Burgers on a set - I’ve also done the Care Bears."<br /><br />But her client requests can be much more niche.<br /><br />She said: “Someone wanted stained glass church windows on all 10 fingers - in a transparent pol
