Hello, hello! Time for another round with the ladies who contribute to the 40 Great Nail Art Ideas posts! This week we're doing another color + pattern challenge and it was a bit tricky for me to come up with an idea for it. It's pretty cool though because everyone is creating manis with Orange, Purple, & Green and then the pattern is different for almost everyone.
So today, I bring you Orange, Purple & Green decals!...and I've never done decals before. As you probably know by now, I am not a stamper. I tried it a couple times (literally) when I first got into nail art, but I was never good at it and my true love lies with freehand nail art anyway so I never tried to get better at stamping.
However, I recently decided to purchase the Uber Mat because I was interested in trying to create my own decals (for the challenge as well as future manis). I'm really excited about the prospects of this! I just need to get better at creating finer lines and get used to painting on a mat instead of on my nails...but lots of potential!
As you can see, I ended up painting a floral mani because florals are my main squeeze ;) I love to paint them and I felt that the color palette I chose lent itself well to flowers.
I started out by painting a few coats of top coat on the mat and then with black acrylic paint I painted the outlines of the flowers and vines. Then, with China Glaze's S'More Fun, Lotus Begin, and Metro Pollen-Tin, I filled in the black outlines like a coloring book! This is basically the lead-light technique that you seem all these talented stamping ladies do. It was fun!
Then, I flipped the decal and adhered and trimmed it around my nail. It wasn't looking as nice as I'd like with a glossy finish so I added a matte top coat.
Overall, I'm still undecided about this technique. It's still really novel to me and I like that I can work at me leisure to paint the designs (and I can run to the bathroom in the middle of painting and not worry about messing up my mani!). I think there is a lot of opportunity to do detailed work and I'm excited for that.
But, there is still a bit of a learning curve for me I think. I'm not especially fast with this method and it probably would have been faster for me to just paint this directly onto my nail instead of onto the mat, but with time hopefully I'll get quicker. I also think my application was a bit messy and there are definitely places that I see that I'm not loving...but all in all, it was fun to do these! And that's really what matters, right?
How do you like these? Have you tried making decals with the uber mat? Or made hand painted decals? Let me know! And be sure to check out the inlinkz below to see what everyone else created for today!
Happy Polishing :)