I've done a bunch of miscellaneous...

I've done a bunch of miscellaneous "getting myself in order" over the last few weeks. This is a fun part of that - swatching my gel polishes. All of them came in black bottles that look exactly the same with little information on the outside. I decided to swatch the polishes on an old crappy nail wheel that I don't care about so I could remove the nail forms and glue them to the bottles.

The first photo is magnetic colors. If I get good with a magnet I'll be able to make designs other than a line, but that will suffice for swatch purposes.

The second photo is neons, obviously. You can tell that I legit used a crappy nail wheel to swatch on because the nails were thin and you can see through them. (I didn't want to waste multiple coats of polish on doing this - I just needed to be able to see what was in the bottle).

The third photo is my boyfriend being a great helper. 😂 He's seriously been into everything with me lately. Me and Kira were going through polish the other day and he wanted to look at them, too. He bit some of them. I don't know if that means he liked them or not, but that's always a positive sign coming from me. 😂😂😂

I've only got about 20 gels to go. I'm hoping that I get them finished up tonight. But for now we've gotta run some errands so I'm off to do that. Later, friends! ❤️

Nail pic! Woohoo! 😃

Nail pic! Woohoo! 😃

So this may not look that spectacular, but I tried a new nail art technique and unlike my nail fail the other day it turned out great. This is something that I've wanted to try for ages, but due to my packed schedule and never really feeling like I had time to "play" I just didn't get to it. I guess I'll go ahead and clue you guys in: The thing I wanted to try was gradient stamping!

The background image is stamped, but with 3 different polish colors (ranging from blue to green). It's done like regular stamping except that you put your chosen colors down in whatever pattern you want (as opposed to just one color covering the image) and then you scrape the excess polish off. I found that I needed to use a light hand so I could mix the colors during the scrape. Stamping polish notoriously dries fast (meaning that if you aren't quick, you can't pick it up on your stamping head - and even if you can, it might be too dry to stick to your nail), so you've gotta be quick. I scraped over each of these backgrounds about 3 times to get a nice gradient.

I tried this over white because I wanted to be able to see just how good of a job I did (or didn't) do. I'm not usually a fan of wearing white polish, but it's summer and these are bright so that's ok. I ALMOST decided to wear just the gradient, but by later in the afternoon I was like "Nah. Where's the fun in that?" 🤣🤣🤣

It feels kind of like a cop-out that I chose to wear another unicorn so soon, but I feel like this background was screaming for her. The plate was sitting on my table from being used previously and when I saw her little happy self - I just knew. 🦄🦄🦄 After that it was easy enough to paint in some stars for color variety.

Anyway, that's my mani for the week. I have no idea if / when I'll get to paint again, but I'm hoping that I will have time at least every weekend. It is such a stress relief and I don't really have any other creative outlets at the moment so I need this in my life. 💅💅💅😁😁