52 week nail art challenge - 7: Nude

Hi everyone,


the seventh prompt of the 52 week nail art challenge is Nude. Add to that the fact that I've been wanting to do a plaid for some time now, and this is what you get:

I started out by painting all my nails with two thin coats of Zoya Agnes, a pinkish nude that is surprisingly opaque so you can probably get away with one medium coat.

When that had dried, I started stamping lots of lines in several widths to create the design I had in mind on my ring finger. All lines come from Clear Jelly Stamper plate CJS-52 (only the best plate to get if you want lines, lines and... guess what? Lines!)

In order:
- first two wide lines in Painted Polish Midnight Mischief to turn half of my nail black
- one wide line in Catrice Gold Effect 02 Fascinating Grace to add some subtle rose gold shimmer to half of the black and half of the nude
- a wide line in Agnes to hide some stray shimmer that accidentally ended up on the nude ;)
- a thin line in Midnight Mischief to divide the shimmery nude from the shimmery black
- a horizontal thin line in Midnight Mischief close to my cuticle
- a slightly thicker horizontal line in Midnight Mischief a bit higher up the nail (or is that lower?)
- a thin line in white Painted Polish Blanc Slate down the center of the non-shimmery black
- a thin line in Blanc Slate between the two horizontal black lines
- and last but not least a slightly thicker line in coppery red Hit the Bottle Rusty Nail

After that, I touched up all lines using the tiniest detail brush I own to make the lines as neat and straight as possible and to remove the smudges I made when stamping while the line underneath wasn't dry enough yet. And when I was finally happy with the result, I waited for another half hour and covered every nail with a generous coat of Seche Vite.


Of course the stamping plate is the real star of this manicure, but I couldn't have done it without the awesome stamping power of these polishes:

Zoya Agnes, Catrice Gold Effect 02 Fascinating Grace, Painted Polish Midnight Mischief, Painted Polish Blanc Slate, Hit the Bottle Rusty Nail

While working on the stamping, I realized how much I love a plaid design. You can't really go wrong as long as the colors are pretty. While doing touch-ups, I realized how hard it is to do a plaid when you're also sort of a perfectionist... those lines never come out exactly straight! All in all, I'm really happy with my nails, even though they took considerably longer than the time I usually spend on a manicure. Do they qualify as nude nails? I don't know about the fifth nail, but four of them sure do :)