Dragonscales

I am so in love with these nails! The mottled look of the scales is stunning! On Messy Mansion's facebook page a fan posted dragonscale nails and I fell in love with them I just had to try them myself. I don't see a blog post from her but I will link to the facebook post here. I don't know what polishes Jae K used, but I painted my nails first with 2 coats of Sinful Colors "Clementine" I then sponged a little bit of Sally Hansen "Lighting" in patches. Where I didn't put "Lighting" is sponged just a teeny tiny amount of Essie "Fifth Avenue". Then I sponged all over it again with "Clementine" to blend all the edges. I went over the top of the red and yellow to make them not so bold. This way it all looked like shades of orange.

Satisfied with the base colors, I then stamped over it with MM21. Scales on all fingers, but a dragon for the accent nail. I used Cosmetic Arts "TGIF". To give you an idea of how big the stamps are, here is my nails before clean up:

More than satisfactory for my nail length.

Here is Jae's picture:

And mine again:

One of my better Monkey See, Monkey Do mani's if I do say so myself.

Purple Hummingbird

Another new month and my nail group World of Nailcraft has posted a new Monthly Pallet Project picture. Each month they post a picture and we have to do a mani based on the colors in the picture. Sometimes we even have to include certain elements, like stamping or dots or gradients. This month it was a Monkey See, Monkey Do meaning, using the colors of the pallet, we had to do a mani based off someone else's manicure.

This was the picture chosen for Febuary. Lukily I had already done a purple gradient hours before the picture was posted and was just trying to decide what to stamp over it. I chose Wacky Laki's Winter Hummingbird mani to mimic. Here's her mani :

Funny thing is we both used MoYou plates, but while she used the Pro collection, I used Suki 1 and Mother Nature 2.

I took progress shots of my gradient because I thought of maybe writing a post on clean up, but I'm still not very good at that, so here is my messy fingers from the gradient.

Yeah, its a mess. Then here is the picture I was gonna use to write about clean up methods, but I'm still not very good at clean up, so I'll wait to write a post on that when I get better.

It may not be perfect, but it's the best clean up I've ever done and I'm super proud! The camera kept wanting to turn my purple into blue so I grabbed the bottle hoping to force the camera to realize how purple the polish is.

And another shot of the finished mani. The colors I used were Cosmetic Arts "Picture Day" Sinful Colors "Tempest" and "Enchanted". The stamping is MoYou Suki 1 for the  blossoms and branches and Mother Nature 2 for the hummingbird. I used Cosmetic Arts "TGIF" for the stamping and added dots of Sally Hansen "Lighting" for the centers of the flowers.