Technique: Dark Clouds

Winter Storm DRACO is here!! I didn’t even know we named snow storms haha. I’m not sure that is necessary. But in light of the storm yesterday, I am posting my dark cloud manicure. If you haven’t seen the cloud mani done before, here is a tutorial. I think Nailside was the first place I saw this done. It is a super easy technique and doesn’t require any additional tools! Just a fairly steady hand to get the straight polish strokes. I’ve seen it usually done with two clouds, but I love this top color so much I wanted to see as much of it as I could!

Here are the polishes I used. Base coat (dark purple) is It’s an Original by Finger Paints. The cloud color/top coat I used is Knackered by Butter London. This one of the coolest polishes I own. It looks best over dark colors, so that is why I used the dark purple as a base coat.

Sorry I don’t have any pics of the dark purple base on my nails but I believe I did 2 coats. Below is a few pictures of the final product. The Knackered is a silver with a sort of rainbow duo chrome. It looks sort of lavender on top of this dark purple, but when you look at the nail sideways it almost looks greyish turquoise.  And the tiny rainbow sparkles in Knackered remind me of rain. Perfect for dark clouds! Love this combo!  

I tried to take a sideways picture so you could see the turqoise duo chrome color but it didn' t turn out the greatest lol.

Week 8: Cling Wrap Technique

This week is week 8 of the 52 week challenge and the theme is Saran/cling wrap technique. If you've never heard of it before it is pretty simple... I'll list the basic steps with additional tips to this technique are at the bottom of the post. In my opinion this technique is easy to do, but it is difficult to get colors that look good using this technique. Some combos can look just messy or dirty.


Base Color used: Champagne Toast by Sally Hansen

Basic steps:
1. Paint base color. 
2. Paint second polish on.
3. Dab crumpled cling wrap on nail.  

Second color used: No Plain Jane by China Glaze.

Tips:
- Let base coat(s) dry completely on all nails before you move on to steps 2 and 3.
- Do NOT let second polish color dry before moving to step 3. Do step 3 almost immediately after step 2.
- Do steps 2 and 3 on each nail right after another.
- Crumple up the cling wrap as tight as you can so you get a wrinkled surface like this.

- Your second polish must be a thick polish that doesn't dry two quickly. This technique only works if you can successfully pick up the second color with the cling wrap ball, and still get some to stay on the nail.
- Final and MOST IMPORTANT TIP: only dab the cling wrap 2-3 times. You want a nice balance of the two colors and more dabs will pick up too much of the second color and distort the design.

Overall, it took me a few tries to get colors that I liked together. I think I really only like metallic colors with this look. I tried solid grey and it just wasn't happenin.. looked too dirty and like I messed up. Here's one more pic with day light.

Technique: Create Your Own Ombre

Surprisingly, this is the first time I have attempted an Ombré. I guess I have been so involved in new and more complicated techniques so I haven’t attempted it. This week is the 7^th week of the 52 Week Challenge and the theme is black and white. I haven’t done a black and white look yet, nor have I done an ombré so I decided to do this Create Your Own Ombré technique!

Basically the “create” part is just mixing some polishes. I really didn’t have the perfect colors for a black to white ombré so I created my own! Below are the 3 polishes I used. Black by Finger Paints, grey by Essie (not sure of actual name, woops!), and White On by Sally Hansen.

I started by painting these polishes by themselves on my pinky (White On), middle finger (grey), and thumb (Black). (sorry for the blurry pic!)

Mix 1: Then comes the mixing. For the ring finger color, I mixed equal drops of White On and the Grey polish. I used a cut off solo cup to hold the polish.

I just mixed it with the grey polish brush. You could use a separate brush if you are really worried about your middle color getting contaminated, but I made sure to drop all the polish I needed before I did my mixing. Then I painted both my left and right ring fingers this light grey color.

After you are done painting your ring fingers, wipe the brush you just used completely on a paper towel (do not use tissue or TP as that will leave paper residue on the brush). If you need to add a little polish remover to the paper towel, however I didn’t feel it was necessary.

Mix 2: Then I did the same thing as Mix 1, but with Black instead of white (equal drops Black and Grey). I then painted both my index fingers the dark grey mixed color.

Voila here is my black to white Create Your Own Ombré!!

Tips for the Create Your Own Ombré:

- Whatever you paint on your left hand, paint on your right hand immediately. This way is the most efficient and you don’t risk having mismatched mixed colors.

i.e. paint in this order: left pinky, right pinky, left middle, right middle, left thumb, right thumb, Mix 1, left ring, right ring, Mix 2, left index, right index.

- Make sure you make enough mixed polish to do 2 coats on 2 fingers. I used about 6-8 drops of each polish.

- For any ombré, make sure you use ALL crème or solid polishes or use ALL shiny polishes. It looks odd if you have a couple shiny/sparkly nail and the others are solid colors.

- Try to avoid sheer polishes with this technique! They will be very difficult to mix correctly and your ombré may not look just right.

- Here are some good 3 polish color combos that would work great for this Create Your Own Ombré technique.

       1. Red, Orange, Yellow

       2. Green, Blue, Purple

       3. Pale/light, Bright, Dark of any color.

Below is an example of a good light to dark blue trio. [Sea Spray by China Glaze, Dating a Royal by OPI, and Up All Night by China Glaze.]

This is super easy and fun! I will definitely be trying this many more times!!

 

Technique: Sparkly Pumpkins + Week 5: Orange

So this is kind of a combined post. Theme of week 5 of the 52 week challenge is ORANGE annnnnd I did a new nail art/technique, hence the long post title :). Here are my sparkly Halloween pumpkins! I usually steer away from any nail art that is too corny looking, but I just love these little cute pumpkins for Halloween. And it really wasn’t all that difficult to do!

First I did a coat of Peachy Kean as a base for the sparkly orange. I don’t have a picture of that, but any orange color would have worked as a base. On top of that I used Fall of Surprises! by Finger Paints. This is two thick coats of it:

So here is 3 pics of how I did the mini pumpkin tips. I did all this black nail art with a nail art polish (has a thinner brush). You can see my critique of nail art tools here.

1. Draw a vertical line in the middle of your nail. This is so you know where the middle of your pumpkin will be. It helps avoid having a crooked and uneven pumpkin.

2. Draw your two humps. I found it easiest to start from the vertical line I drew first, draw half a hump, then start at the edge of the nail and draw the other half of the hump. Then repeat with other hump. Hope that makes sense haha.

3. Then fill in the rest of the area with the black nail art polish.

After that I added a cute little green stem (also with a nail art polish) to these mini pumpkins.

For the thumb, I had a bigger canvas so I did a jack-o-lantern instead of a mini pumpkin.

The right thumb jack-o-lantern doesn’t look this good, but it doesn’t look bad. Just did a smile instead of teeth and did the best I could for triangle eyes on my right thumb. No sweat!

Here is one more pic with the nail art polishes I used! Love this festive look :)

Technique: Freehand Fishtail

I just saw this technique the other day on Reddit Laqueristas. It looks sort of like a fishtail braid. I've seen people do it much thicker than this, but if you layer the polish swipes you can get the stripes much thinner... like this!

After you've done your top coat on all 10 nails, set up all your striping polishes unscrewed in the order you want to use them. Here is mine all set up. Colors from left to right are: Why Not by Sinful Colors, Orange It's Obvious! by Essie, Houston we have a Purple by OPI, Fly by OPI, and Electric Pineapple by China Glaze.

Here's a step by step pic tutorial of how I did this fishtail look. Basically its just an alternating layered striping technique. You just use the polish brush for the stripes. The last step is in the next pic.

After you finish the striping you cover up the bottom in your base color. I used a nail art brush for better control.

Tips:
- Use a thin polish if you can and make your stripes as thin as you can.  The thinner the stripes the less the layers mix together.
- Use a sheer polish if you want the layer overlaping to show up.
- GO SLOW. this is why I only did two nails each hand. I had to go very slow to paint in a straight line.
- to have more control of your brush, steady your "painting hand" on the surface your painting. i.e. rest the pinky or ring finger of your painting hand on the table your left hand is resting on. This should steady your hand a little bit.

week 1= TAPING

WEEK 1 of the 52 WEEK CHALLENGE!!

So the first week started this Monday (10/1) and the theme is TAPING! I have done this technique here and here on this blog before. I liked my splatter nails from the weekend SO much that I couldn't part with them just yet. Sooooo I just used them as the base :)

First I taped up my nails. I didnt really use any sort of pattern. Just did one strip of tape on each nail. Made the strips pretty thick so you could see the splatter design. Sorry the tape is kind of hard to see...

Then I painted on the gold color(Go for the Gold by Essie) that I used for the splatter.

Here is the final pic:

So here is a quick list of TIPS FOR TAPING that I have learned along the way:

1. Your base coat must be COMPLETELY dry. Otherwise it will be picked up by the tape when it is removed.

2. If you are worried about the base coat coming off with the tape, stick the tape once on your skin before applying it to the nail. This will make it less sticky, but hopefully still sticky enough to stay on your nail.

3. Remove the tape as soon as you paint on top of it. I usually tape one whole hand, paint one nail, remove tape, paint one nail, remove tape... etc. Then repeat with the other hand.

4. Make the lighter color the base color and the darker color the top coat. If you want the top color a light color you have to make sure it is opaque. You can't really wait for 3 coats to dry to take off the tape.

5. If you are using thin strips of tape, try to pre-cut them before applying. It is quite difficult to use a scissors with taped nails :) Below is how I had the stripes laid out for this one. I cut more than 10 just in case I didn't like some of the sizes.

So there you have it. Quick tips to taping and the start of a year of fun nails weekly!!

Technique: Splatter Nails

So this was my first try at splatter nails. I used this tutorial, so I am just going to do a quick summary of what I learned while trying this technique.

I started with a dark purple base coat (2 coats). This one is No More Film by Essie. (I just love Essie polishes so much!) It looks almost black, but I wanted a good contrast with the splatter so this was perfect.

Below is a pic of my set up. (The gold is Good as Gold by Essie). Basically I just used a plastic straw cut in half (you have more control over the straw if it is short) and a dime/nickel size amount of polish on a plastic plate. You really need a good amount of polish to dip the straw in for this to work. I had to keep replenishing my pile of polish throughout the splattering process.

So instead of going into detail about the process (tutorial is linked at the top) I will just point out some things I learned from doing this the first time…

The below order of operations worked best for me:

1.  Paint all nails with base color. 
2.  Tape around nails of one hand. One tape on bottom, 2 on sides.

3. Splatter with other color. (Good as Gold by Essie)

4.  Splatter lightly with base color. (No More Film by Essie)
5.  Carefully take off tape.
6.  While waiting for first hand to dry, clean up polish on skin with brush/Q-tip and nail polish remover.
7.  Repeat steps 2-6 on other hand.

Some Tips:

- TAPE AROUND YOUR NAILS FIRST. Below, pic A shows how bad the splatter gets all over your hands without tape. Pic B shows how much nicer it was pre-cleanup.

pic A: after splatter (no tape)

 pic B: after tape, pre-cleanup

- You need a layer of polish at the bottom of the straw for the splatter to work. If you are blowing through the straw and no polish is coming out, then you probably need more polish in your dipping pile. The polish will only splatter out of the straw if the hole of the straw is completely covered in polish. The below pics show what will and will not work.

- Don’t blow to close to the nail. The end of your straw should be about 5 or 6 inches from your nail. If the straw is too close you will just get a big blob of polish.

- Use contrasting colors. You can even use multiple colors instead of just 2, but I think a really dark and fairly light combo looks best!

So there you have it. I am just in LOVE with this look! Definitely will do this technique again!

Technique: lace + mint

So a couple months ago, I kind of just gave up on blogging. I was being way too much of a perfectionist about it and wouldn’t post nails/pics unless they were flawless. It started to get really frustrating and time consuming; not at all what I started the blog for in the first place. However, I recently came across reddit.com/r/RedditLaqueristas and instantly became inspired. The positivity and enthusiasm on the site has motivated me to keep polishing and keep blogging- sans perfection. So who cares if I couldn’t perfect this next technique. At least I gave it a shot :)

So this technique is supposed to look like a corner of lace.. but I did it quite fast so it didn’t turn out the best. I actually think I should have stopped after the first set of dotting but it still looks pretty, even if you can’t tell its lace.

I started with 2 coats of this pretty mint polish (Re-Fresh Mint by China Glaze). I’ve noticed that for mint polishes they always look a little darker on your nails than in the bottle. So when picking out a mint, pick a little lighter shade than you want. This one almost looks pastel blue in the bottle, but is a perfect mint on my nails.

For the start of my accents (only did 3 nails each hand) I made a little cloud looking shape in the corner of my nails. I used a French manicure pen for this because I felt it gave me more control for the half circles than a brush would. I had to color the clouds in twice because the French manicure polish in the pen is pretty thin.

Next, to give it more of a frayed lace look, I dotted around the edges of these little humps. I’m thinking this step could be skipped if you use a color other than blue for your base coat. I did this to make it look less like clouds and more like lace.

For the next step of the lace look, I used a dotting tool. I’ve heard of some people also using pins stuck in erasers, works the same I would assume. Basically, I started by putting 3 small dots under each “hump”.  I think this is enough to make it look like lace, but I was feelin’ fancy so I added some more dots and hearts.

Here is the final look with a coat of Seche Vite. I planned on adding a matte coat, but I did a top coat of Seche Vite first to level out the dots/designs. At the top is the final look with the matte coat. I think the matte made it look more like lace, but the shinny coat looks nice too!

Yay for polishing and posting again!! I’m excited :)