A Tale of Two Gradients

I love nail gradients.

But I had very little idea of how to do them, so I experimented. Here are the results.

 That middle brown looks a lot like milk chocolate. Yum.

In the first, I simply painted a base color (Zoya Dea), then painted on top of it from the cuticle and tip using Zoya Cheryl and Goldie.

Advantages:

• Thick, vibrant colors.
• The gold had a really cool fire effect.
• No additional tools required.
• No wasted polish.

Disadvantages:

• Time-consuming.
• Technical.
• To get that really cool fire effect of the gold, I had to start with just enough polish on the brush to get a solid color on the tip, and then have it taper 1/4" in.  It was complicated to get right.
• It's not really a gradient, but more of a neapolitan ice cream look.
• Thick paint means a loooooong time to dry, and higher chance of getting air bubbles.

 Despite the disadvantages, I did really like this design and was sad to have to remove it.

 The second design... well, it wasn't very photogenic:

 I wore this with a purple-and-white print shirt.

I used four colors: black, Cheryl, Merlot and Zoya Kamilah.  For this design, instead of painting directly on the nails, I painted onto a makeup sponge, and then pressed the sponge to the nails.  I learned quickly that for decent coverage, I needed to reload the sponge between each use.  In the picture, you can see that the pinky nail has very deep, solid color, but the pointer and middle fingernails are thin enough to see the light nail tip.  Whoops.

Advantages:

• Quick and easy.
• It's a real gradient.
• Therefore, it looks very cool (despite the inexplicable failure of the camera to make it look that way).

Disadvantages:

• Easy to forget to reload the sponge, so it's easy to end up with thin paint on a few nails.
• Requires use of a makeup sponge.
• Wasted a lot of paint due to deep soaking into the sponge.
• Messy - required a lot of cleanup.

Despite the weird image quality, I actually liked this design better than the first, because it's a true gradient, and unless you're inspecting it closely you can't really see how thin the polish is.

It also looks like actual fire, which is awesome.

Pink and Blue Flowers

Do you have a personal flower style? As in, if someone asks you to draw a flower, or if you were just doodling around, you kind of do the same thing over and over?

Well, I do. And when fiddling around with my nails after removing the abstract art that was just SO COOL, I ended up with those same flowers that I've muddled with since probably elementary school.

My flower style is very simple. Five petals, no stigma (the middle part where pollen and nectar are found), no stem, with little shoot-things between each petal.

The quality of this image makes Ansel Adams cry.

I used Sinful Colors' Merlot for the petals of all but the ring finger, and Wet 'n' Wild's Lavender Pearlescent for the shoots (if anyone has a better name for these, I'm all ears!). For the ring finger, I used Sinful Colors' Aqua for the petals and Wet 'n' Wild's Blue Moon for the shoots.

That tiny paintbrush (the only actual tool I owned at the time) did a great job. I created the petals by starting at the center and gently flicking the brush outward in a V shape, then filling it in. Once the petals were dry, I added the shoots, which were a simple, single-motion line. I painted two flowers on each nail except the pinkie because it's so small, waited for it to dry, then added a topcoat.

At this point, my ambidexterity was already improving - my right hand was almost as pretty as the left! Though, it did take a lot more time and effort. I think this is the first design I created that got questions about whether I'd had them done professionally, too.

This is also a very versatile design. It can be done with any combination of colors, and any size flower.

I think I'm going to have to do this design again, at the very least so that I can take high quality photos instead of that sadface cameraphone picture!

First Successful Nail Art

So much mediocrity! I'd painted a few pretty things, but nothing really unique and fun. Then, a few days into March, I found this video. Me: "I MUST TRY THIS." I've always loved abstract everything, and really, really enjoy taking abstract photography, so abstract work on my nails is just the logical next step.

Obviously, being painfully limited in color choice, I didn't have the colors called for in that video. But Sinful Colors' Merlot and Aqua are quite pretty together, so that's what I used, along with Sally Hansen's white and Sinful Colors' Black on Black.

In the future, when my creations and this blog actually start overlapping in time, I'll have pictures for each step of the process. For now, the video linked above has the steps, and this is my result:

SWIRLY

It's a bit busier than I would've liked, but for a first try at anything fancier than a swoosh with dots, I was pretty happy with it. I got a number of compliments from strangers on it, too!

EGO BOOST.

Next up: My first real, successful, actually-pretty-and-even-elegant nail design.

Taking a step back

The first attempt at being all fancy turned out kind of mediocre, so I backed off and started simplifying. For pretty much all of January, I wore only the UV topcoat that came with the French manicure kit.

There is something strange happening with the polish on my middle finger.

This let me practice painting, which went from clumsy to, well, not-quite-as-clumsy. It also strengthened and protected my already ridiculously strong, tough nails, and gave me something to admire until I felt comfortable trying something new again.

Meanwhile, I found YouTube nail art tutorials.

NAIL ART TUTORIALS!

And so many of these tutorials were just breathtaking. Simple to create, but so pretty.

I started slow, in large part because I had a grand total of five colors (including black and white) available to me, and the only tools I had were the brushes that came with the bottles and a tiny art brush that doubles for eyeliner. For the following images, the polishes used were: Sally Hansen French White, Sinful Colors Black on Black, Sinful Colors Aqua, and Wet 'n Wild Lavender Pearlescent (which is actually a dark pink, so the name makes no sense at all).

Also, I was obsessed with French tips. Color was irrelevant, so long as there were distinguishable tips. I've found that solid nails give the illusion that the nail is shorter than it is.

In order of experiment, three designs:

Credit for this design idea here.

Cleanest French tip done to date. One nail only? Art nouveau.

Cleaning up edges is optional.

This takes us up through the end of February. March begins going deeper into polish fascination with more (and better... ahem) designs.

Getting Started

So, the first 26 years of my life I had little to no interest in nail polish.

And then suddenly, friends that I spent lots of time with were ALL ABOUT NAIL POLISH. Talking about it almost daily, buying pretty polishes and sharing pictures of nail conquests. At the time, I owned precisely zero nail polishes.

Welp, turns out nail polish enthusiasm is contagious.

It also turns out that eBay has ridiculously cheap nail brush sets.

It also also turns out that Zoya 3 for 3 sales are hard to turn down.

Going to the store every Monday to buy my lunches for the week means walking down the cosmetics aisle... which means that I'm slowly stocking up on polish. My first polish purchase was when their fanciest polish was on sale, so I got four really pretty colors for about $10. I figured I also needed a topcoat, but the only option was a French manicure set of three.

Oh well! I can totally use the white and sheer pink too. And bonus sticky guides!

So, y'know what I did? I went home and made the most obnoxious nail art EVER.

I started with two coats of Merlot and then one coat of Pearl Harbor by Sinful Colors, which resulted in a sleek, classy red peppered with bumpy, greenish spots (not the fault of the polish - this was me being TERRIBLE at applying the stuff). Yet, this wasn't enough for the ambitious me of December 2011; there needed to be an actual design.

The Sally Hansen French manicure kit had come with something like 40 curved and 40 straight guides. Inspiration struck - I would make an elegant white swoosh with an elegance that elegance itself would bow down to. One swoosh per nail. Genius.

The number of guides was limited, so I figured that they must be used sparingly and repeatedly. So, for all the swooshes, on both hands, I used four guides. To create the swoosh I simply put the two guides at an angle to each other, and then painted within the gap, starting with the thumb and moving towards the pinkie.

Now, the thing about reusing guides is, nail polish dries and globs with each use, filling in the narrow end of the gap between them and generally making them much more likely to leak.

By the time I finished the pinkie nail, the swoosh was looking pretty ragged.

So I had gaudy red sparkly nails with a white swoosh on them.

Clearly not enough.

I NEEDED DOTS.

Three dots, diminishing in size, along the top of the swoosh. This was going to be epic.

And y'know, the dots didn't turn out too badly. A bit lopsided, but generally circular and smooth-ish.

Topcoat, and then wait for three hours for the thick slop of polish to dry and harden!

And, naturally, I didn't know how to/didn't want to bother with cleanup before snapping a cameraphone image of my creation to show off.

I didn't figure out the importance of cleanup until just a few weeks ago.

Here's the masterpiece:

I am amazing. Clearly.