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Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Sponge Gradients & Hand painted Trees

Wow 2 days in a row?! I must really be inspired :) More likely I have finally been having some days off from both jobs. You have no idea how much I enjoyed that! Most importantly, to this blog anyways, it also gave me some free time to paint my nails! Yay!

 
 
Lately I have been like borderline obsessed with gray and yellow together. Sorry I don't have the link to show you one of the examples that caught my eye but I loved the yellow and gray sponge gradient and knew I just had try it out for myself. No in the past I feel like I have kind of struggled with getting my sponge gradient to turn out how I wanted. This time around I found 2 very important key points that helped make my gradient 100% better.

1st, once you pick your colors for the gradient take the time to mix blend the section where they touch with a toothpick. This will automatically create a beautifully blended gradient when the sponge picks it up with out you having to do a lot of work with the sponge.

2ndly, wait for your polish to be absolutely dry in between each coat with the sponge. I was never patient enough for this before and often ended up pulling off bits of color with the sponge.

Hope those tips help improve your sponge gradients too! Here is a pic of the polishes I used.


First I painted my nails white using Scorch by Illamaqua with 2 coats so it wasn't streaky. I used a coat of OTD quick dry top coat. 

 

 


As you can see from the polish bottle picture, I only used 2 colors to create each of my gradients. For the purple gradient, I used Sinful Colors polish in Sweet Tooth & Amethyst. The Gray and Yellow was Zoya in Pippa & Kristen.


You can see how well just taking a few seconds to pre mix the polish creates that beautiful gradient. This was two coats of sponging, making sure it was all the way dry before I applied the second.

Lastly I tried to use my Winstonia plates that had an awesome looking tree on plate W102 to stamp on my nails.


I say try because for the life of me I could not get it to stamp properly so in the long run I ended up hand painting with some black nail art polish so that is why they all look a bit different.

 

 
Overall, I was pretty happy with how they turned out. Hope you like them :)

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Love Sick Puppy

Hi Gals!!!!

I know it has been some time since I last posted. Sorry, what can I say except that life gets crazy and in the way of doing my nails A LOT. I switched branches where I work full time as well as still keeping my second job from Christmas, so it has definitely taken it's toll on the amount of time I have for not only doing the nail art, but then blogging about it. I definitely admire some of my favorite nail blogs for the amount of dedication it takes to do both every day.

Now that I have apologized, on to the manicure!

with flash


For this manicure I knew I wanted to use the gorgeous Love Sick Puppy pink. I decided to do a glitter gradient using another new glitter I ordered from Carwright's, a light mint green glitter called Crème de Menthe. Then for fun I glued on a 3D Lollipop using nail glue. This was a super quick manicure but I am dreading having to take it off... Especially since I had to put a UV Gel Top coat on it to make it smooth. Hope everyone is having a nice summer :)

without flash