Truly awesome nail design

I really shouldn't call this 'design', because that sounds like there was some intent of pattern. This week, there was only colour, and very little in the way of intent, other than 'let's see how much colour I can get on one nail'.

The colours I had in mind were *partly* inspired by a painting I saw last week. One rich in reds and pinks with just a touch of blue. Of course, I could be completely wrong about that, but that is the idea I've taken away in my mind. It was a truly gorgeous picture, with such wonderful colours, that I really wanted to capture it somehow.

So after rummaging around in my (quite large) nail polish collection, I decided on these...

The colours are - in order, left to right - Dear Santa, Don't Whine, Yukon Do It, Purple With a Purpose, Deer Valley Spice, It's All Greek to Me and the blue is Teal the Cows Come Home.


Because the painting had no visible structure, I decided to use an approach to nail polish that I used once before. I don't have a name for it, and I doubt it would be easy to get it done in a salon, but it's basically a dab effect. As in, I put polish on the brush and then 'dab' the brush on my nail. Violently, so I can get some coverage; little dabs would be no good, as all I would end up with would be spots on my clear basecoat. After the first coat, it looked like this -

As you can see, it's all over my fingers, but that never worries me as the polish usually peels off easily from flesh. Though, it helps to let it all dry properly and pull it off - it works especially best with 3 or 4 layers.

The second coat of this type of design is pretty tricky; you want to keep the colours in pretty much the same place, but at the same time, you're going over other colours that are now over the original colour. It's all a bit higgledy-piggledy at this point. And deciding which colours to put first and last can be difficult. In this case, I painted them in the order I had them standing above, so the blue went on top to really stand out from the reds, pinks and purple. And here is the finished design

 My left hand tends to be my favourite, as it is usually much neater than my right. Being right handed really means my nail art only works on one hand.











I really like the way the polish turned out on my left thumb. You can actually see all of the colours I applied to it.

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 My right hand, just for show.









I applied a layer of Shatter to my right thumb, just to see what the effect was like. I didn't want to do it to all my nails, in case it was too busy, but I think it turned out alright in the end.