Colors of the sea

Hi everyone!


Want to know what I did this Sunday? Look!!! I did my very first gradient!!!

indoors, no flash

I must have read Sammy's (The Nailasaurus) tutorial and watched her video at least twenty times, thinking I would never be able to do stuff like that as I'd read everywhere gradients were so hard to do and it took years of practice to get something that didn't look like polish bottles exploded all over the place. So I actually never tried it... yup, I admit it, I was scared...

This morning I stumbled on a gorgeous manicure by Kirby (The Mercurial Magpie) so I decided to just try and see if I could do something that resembled it. I figured since it was a Sunday I would have plenty of time to remove the expected mess and paint my nails with something that wouldn't cause me to keep my hands in my pockets the entire time. I took a deep breath, searched the house for a plastic wallet like in the tutorial, grabbed the polishes Kirby used and cut a few pieces of an unused kitchen sponge as I don't have any make up sponges.

I started to paint my nails with two coats of my go to white polish, OPI Alpine Snow, followed by a coat of Seche Vite to help it dry. After that I painted a line of OPI Alpine Snow, a line of OPI Mermaid's Tears and a line of OPI Can't Find My Czechbook next to each other on the plastic wallet, swirled through the "borders", dabbed the sponge in the polish and after that on my nail... and started jumping up and down as it actually looked good!

So I shoved my hand under my husbands nose (too bad he was trying to stay alive while being attacked by all sorts of digital nasties, this was IMPORTANT) for him to adore, took a picture and send it to a friend (who isn't interested in polish at all but again, this was IMPORTANT) and kept bouncing with joy.

I repeated the process for all nails (just skipped the picture sending) and of course my husband had to be shown each and every stage of my attempt to master The Gradient (he really is the most patient guy in the world ;)

indoors, no flash

When all my nails were properly covered with polish and Seche Vite, I used Essence Stampy Polish in White and Born Pretty plate BP-L003 to stamp over the gradient, followed by yet another coat of Seche Vite (I actually used enough of that stuff to lower the fill line of my bottle about 2 mm, just for this manicure).

These were the contributors without which I would not have been able to make this manicure:

OPI Alpine Snow, OPI Mermaid's Tears, OPI Can't Find My Czechbook, Essence Stampy Polish in White

I'm just SO proud of my nails. Every time I look at them I go "YES! I did it!!" inside and I can't stop grinning. Have you ever felt like that when trying a new technique? Hope you all have a great week, I know I'll be showing off my nails... a lot!!

Ooh, and I just realized I can check off another SBBNailChallenge challenge, nr. 53: 3 color gradient + a pattern: