Friday Triad: inspired by Kakine Nail Art

Hi everyone!


It's the last Friday of the month again so Michelle, Juanita and me are ready (or at least we should be ;) to show you our version of the manicure Michelle chose, this lovely black-n-pink one by Kakine Nail Art.

Rest assured, I didn't freehand the swirls. I tried and tried but it looked horrible and that was on my non-dominant hand so I didn't even try to do it on my dominant phalanges. I know what my strong points are and freehanding anything isn't one of them! So I played and fiddled and pulled polishes out of my stash (I had 30 of them on my desk at one point ;) and experimented some more while the clock steadily ticked on, and the calendar crept closer to the last day of the month... but thanks to a happy accident I created something that I really liked so without further ado here's my Friday Triad manicure for the month of June:

I think there's a lot of the original manicure in there, just not the freehand part or the colors or the metallic finish... but it's still recognizable, right?

I started out by painting all my nails with two coats of OPI Alpine Snow and a thin coat of Seche Vite. While that dried and hardened I put small blobs of three different purple polishes on my mat, lightest to darkest: OPI Do You Lilac It?, OPI Lost My Bikini in Monokini and OPI O Suzi Mio. I swirled them together a bit using a dotting tool, put a stamping guide on top and tried to pick up a strip of polish using a stamper. That may sound like a smart idea but it definitely wasn't as the polish squeezed its way through everything and I basically had a stamper full of polish instead of a nice strip so I stamped it on a clear part of the mat to clean off most of the polish before using scotch tape for the remaining stuff and sat back to figure out what I was going to do as this was a failure...

Enter my savior (aka husband) who happened to walk past me, doubled back, looked at the mess on my mat and asked me what I was going to do with that. I started to reply that I would simply clean it off with acetone when I noticed the stamped swirled purple stuff actually made a pretty neat decal. So I figured it wouldn't hurt to check out what it would look like on white. I covered it with a coat of Seche Vite to make it a bit sturdier, waited a while longer (and finished my book in the meantime), peeled the decal off of the mat and cut strips from it that were 3mm wide, about a third of the width of my nails. I painted another coat of Seche Vite on one nail, carefully placed one of the purple strips in the center and covered the entire thing with some more Seche Vite. Rinse and repeat for the other nails :)

When everything had thoroughly dried and I had made a good start with the new book I selected I covered everything but the purple strips with liquid latex, left that to dry (and read a bit more) and stamped a swirly image from UberChic 4-01 using my go to white stamping polish Hit the Bottle Snowed In. Another coat of Seche Vite to seal it all and done...


These polishes are still on my desk at the moment, waiting to be put back in their spot:

OPI Alpine Snow, OPI Do You Lilac It?, OPI Lost My Bikini in Monokini, OPI O Suzi Mio, Hit the Bottle Snowed In

I had my heart set on freehanding swirls on the gorgeous blue metallic polish I selected but I guess I'm going to need a lot more training if I'm ever going to produce something I would maybe consider showing to you guys. For now I'm just very happy with the purple smooshy strips with swirly thingies that are on my nails and the fact that it's not even Friday as I type this (I will not disclose how close it is to Midnight though ;) Also I'm sooo curious to see what Michelle and Juanita have done with this inspiration. If you're interested as well, just click their names and you will be transported to their sites within seconds!



Hit the Bottle Snowed In was bought from Hypnotic Polish.