ModCloth Nail Klub Nail Art Challenge

I was pleasantly surprised when I received an email last Wednesday from ModCloth, asking me to participate in their Nail Klub nail art challenge.  The challenge is to create a nail art look inspired by one of their many dresses.  One of their many, many, many dresses.  So many dresses!  It took me a while to narrow it down.  I started a Pinterest board just to try to keep track of all the ones that sparked an idea for nail art.  In the end though, I kept coming back to a dress called In the Key of Chic Dress in Polka Dots.

To mimic the design of the dress, I started out with 2 coats of Milani White On The Spot.  Once dry, I sponged a gradient onto Bundle Monster plate BM-018, using OPI Red Hot Rio, OPI I Just Can't Cope-acabana, and OPI Ogre-The-Top Blue, which I then scraped and stamped onto my nails.  One of the things I really loved about this dress was the way the colors were blended throughout the dots.  In the smaller thumbnail image, it looks like just solid dots of red, yellow, and blue.  But if you view the enlarged photo of the dress on the ModCloth site, you can see that the colors sometimes mix with each other, creating some dots with streaks of several colors and even blending to create some orange and green tones.

My original plan for this whole design was actually to start off with a gradient base, rather than white.  Then stamp on white polish with a design from BM-423, which would leave dots of the gradient underneath peeking through.  The gradient itself was looking pretty awesome.  But with the stamp applied, not so much.  The dots just didn't pop on the nail the way they did on the dress and the white borders were too thick.  So then I decided to reverse it and stamp with a gradient instead.  I've stamped with multiple colors at once before, and ended up with some blending in the final result.  But I wanted to make sure I'd get much more of a gradient effect this time.  So rather than just placing blobs of polish next to each other on the plate and hoping they would blend a little when scraped, I sponged the gradient onto the plate just like I would onto my nails.  And I was extremely happy with the results!

I repeated the stamp on all my nails and then top coated with Seche Vite to seal it in.

Ideally, I would have loved to have added some type of bright blue accent for the blue bow wrapped around the waist of the dress.  And believe me I tried.  Multiple times.  In the process, I confirmed that I can't free hand a bow to save my life, lol.  I tried stamping a few different bow designs, but none of them looked right or were just not opaque enough.  I even went so far as to attempt both a ruffian design and framed nails to try and incorporate the bright blue of the bow.  When all that fell flat, I decided to just stick with what worked.  So I finally left my little polka dots alone, and I think they look great all by themselves.  There's 52 other dresses from ModCloth still on my Pinterest board (now you can understand my need to organize them!), so if I'm ever stuck for nail art inspiration in the future, that'll probably be the first place I turn to.

Milani Sugar Rim

I picked up Milani Sugar Rim a few weeks back, so when I decided to cut back my nails, rather than deal with a patch when my index nail cracked, I reached for Sugar Rim.  I wore one coat of Sugar Rim over OPI Ogre-The-Top Blue.

Sugar Rim is a matte glitter in a clear base, and was super easy to apply.  I love the mix of colors in this glitter.  There's black, red, pastel blue and a pale yellow.  There's also some metallic silver shards mixed in, which honestly, I still can't decide if I like or not.  There's not a ton of silver pieces in the glitter mix, so they don't overpower the polish, but there's a small part of me that thinks I'd love the glitter so much more if they hadn't been added at all.

Shards and all, I really liked the way the glitter looked over this blue base.  I used three coats of OPI Ogre-The-Top Blue.  But I'd also like to do some experimenting on a nail wheel to test out some other colors to use as a base for Sugar Rim.  I can see this working really well over quite a few different colors!  

Valentine's 2013

Last week I wore two different designs during the week for Valentine's Day.  The first design was my first attempt at using striping tape and the second design was straight out of my good ol' comfort zone...plaid stamping.

For the first design, I started with a coat of Milani's one coat glitter in Red Sparkle.  Once that dried, I taped off 4 lines at random on most of my nails with striping tape.  Then, one nail at a time, I painted on one coat of Finger Paints Black Expressionism and immediately peeled off the striping tape to reveal the red glitter beneath.  On my ring finger, I stamped a hearts design from Bundle Monster plate BM-317 using Konad Special Polish in black.  Then I finished all the nails off with a coat of Seche Vite top coat.

The only thing I don't really like about the Milani one coat glitters is that when they dry, there always seems to be a few dull looking spots that top coat doesn't even seem to help.  I still loved the look but I kept thinking it might have turned out better if I had used Nubar Fire Sparkle like I did for Valentine's Day last year.

For the second design, I started with two coats of OPI Mod About You.  The plaid design is from Konad m60, stamped first with Konad Special Polish in black, then again with Konad white.  I was planing to stamp a single heart on each tip, but I could see the black lines showing through the first heart I stamped.  So I quickly scrapped that idea and grabbed the first red polish at hand, China Glaze Red Satin, and my dotting tools.  I used the largest dotting tool to dot one heart on each nail.  Then I re-dotted over the hearts using China Glaze Ring in the Red to add some glitter and also because Red Satin was a bit jelly and not quite opaque enough by itself.

I loved both of these designs but of course, big shocker, I loved the plaid more!

Hearts-A-Plenty

This past week, I've been wearing a pink manicure with red hearts as my first Valentine design of 2012.  It was more or less done on the fly.  I had a Valentine idea I wanted to do but I wanted to save it for Valentine's Day itself, which left me feeling unsure of what I should to do for the week before Valentine's Day.  So it kind of evolved as I was painting my nails, without a real clear picture in my mind of what I would end up with.

Since I planned to focus on red for the week of Valentine's Day, I decided to go with a bunch of pink shades for the week before.  I started with a few coats of OPI Mod About You.  Then I taped off part of my nails at an angle and used a coat of OPI Sparrow Me the Drama, taped them off again and made a third stripe with Milani Digital.  Even though I read a ton of blogs, I'm not used to doing my nails with the intent of posting it online, so I completely forgot to consider taking pictures of my striped nails prior to stamping.  I'll have to remember from now on to take pictures in between steps.

While everything was drying, I sifted through my stamping plates trying to decide what I was going to use on top.  I finally settled on a tiled hearts pattern from Red Angel plate 114 and used Konad Special Polish in red.  I just recently bought the Red Angel plates off of Amazon after seeing them on Enamel Girl's blog, so I was looking for a chance to use them again.  It wasn't my best attempt at stamping though.  I usually don't have issues with the full nail patterns but this time I think that I end up pushing too hard when I was rolling the stamper.  I didn't even realize there was a pretty badly blurred spot, right on the tip of my left hand middle finger, until I was browsing through my pictures.  I also think that this design ending up looking better from a distance rather than close up.

Overall though, I was pretty happy with the way it turned out.  I'll be working my my next Valentine manicure this weekend, so I hope to have that up sometime during the week.  I also received my February Birchbox a few days ago, so I might take some pictures of what samples I received this month and do a post on that sometime this week as well.