Strawberries!

Sometimes a mani turns out way more fantastic than I imagined. 

Today is one of those days! 

First, I painted the nails using Gelish's Arctic Freeze, Gossip Girl and Go Girl. Pretty simple so far. I then used a dotting tool to paint the polka dot nails using Go Girl on top of the Gossip Girl nails and top coated it. Then the real fun started! 

Scroll down to see a tutorial of how I did everything. 

 Here are my trusty tools. I've tried quite a few different brands of stampers, scrapers and polishes but the best is always Konad. Thank you Amazon! 

As far as stamping plates go, I love all the brands I've tried. I buy them on Amazon, Etsy, straight from the companies...they're all great. The two I used today are Mash-75 and Winstonia 118.

 To make the large strawberry, I quickly blob on some green and hot pink stamping polish and scrape it off before it dries. 

After that its pretty simple to just pick up the image with a rubber stamper and apply it to the nail. 

(If you've never tried nail stamping, there are about a bazillion YouTube videos you can watch)

Now for the strawberry print nails! 

The pattern on the plate is just a simple outline, which would have been pretty cute, but I thought I could do a little better than that. 

 Once the stamp dries on the stamper, I used a teeny tiny brush to color it in with the two polish colors I already used on the large strawberry. It doesn't need to be totally perfect but theres no hurry either.

 Next I used a basic topcoat (don't use anything fancy or the image might be too stiff to use) to generously cover the entire image and let dry completely. 

 Then I carefully used a pair of tweezers to lift up all the edges.

And then lift it off and place it face down on the nail and cover with topcoat. It needed a bit of cleanup around the edges but that's no big deal. 

Thanks Mom! Love you! 

See you Monday!

Roses!!!

Spring is here! for me that means FLOWERS FLOWERS and more FLOWERS!!!

So of course I can't help but paint flowers on pretty much every manicure I do these days. 

This Mani Monday post is devoted to hand painted roses and all the fun things you an use them for. 

On all of these manis, I do a complete gel polish mani with top coat then wipe the sticky residue off with alcohol. After that I paint the roses using regular polishes, then cure another coat of gel top coat. 

Here are some different views of my latest work of art. Red roses on an electric blue background. 

For this mani, I first used Gelish's Ocean Wave on all the nails and finished it off with Top it Off. I could have left the mani there (and it would have been lovely) but I had some time so I then used regular nail polishes in various shades of red to paint the roses on three fingers of each hand. After the roses were dry, I covered them with another coat of Top it Off and called it a day! 

For this manicure, I used Gelish's Gossip Girl (my favorite hot pink!) and ASP's Blue Crush for the accent nails. After that I used various pink polishes and some green leaves. I loved how this one turned out!

Polka Dots and Roses! I painted the nails with Gelish's Arctic Freeze and Cashmere Kind of Gal then used those same gel colors to hand paint the polka dots. 

My final rose mani is inspired by Romeo and Juliet and I was trying to make it look lovely and dramatic and romantic and everything that Rom and Jules is. 

Before I added the roses, I stamped the pretty gold lattice to add extra romance. Plus I'm kinda in love with the wedding and broken heart nails. 

Want to try hand painted rose nails for yourself yet? Check out this great tutorial I found on Pinterest. Trust me, you're going to love it! 

Thanks for reading,

See you Monday!