Showing posts with label essie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label essie. Show all posts

Saturday, July 30, 2016

Simple Sunday Mani

Hello Readers!

Every Sunday I go to church, and so I prefer to do a more simple, formal manicure on Saturday night to wear next day. (Because I have little ones, I find that painting my nails during the day is a sure-fire way to end up with a ruined paint job. I ALWAYS smudge it when I try.)

Today I had a couple of polishes I really wanted to try out, both from Essie- "Belugaria" and "Jump in my Jumpsuit." I found them on clearance at Walgreens recently and have been scheming up what to do with them ever since.

In case you are not familiar with it, Belugaria is a textured polish meant to resemble caviar. I didn't realize this when I picked it up, so I was pretty surprised when I swatched it! I decided to try reverse stamping with it to see what would happen.


As it turns out, it doesn't look that different than regular polish with the advanced stamping technique. Once you get the topcoat on, it kind of smooths it out, though it is a bit more 3-D than a normal polish. 

I also used Sinful Colors "Devil's Stare" over the Essie's "Jump in my Jumpsuit" for the accent nail. I decided to stamp my image in Sinful Colors "Easygoing", because I wanted a more subtle look instead of a harsh white line. 

The image I used is from the Born Pretty XL plate "BP-L015". You can see it in the photo, just next to my index finger. 

Thanks for looking, and Happy Polishing!
-The Midnight Stamper

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Nail Fails: Learning from your mistakes

Do you ever have a great idea in your head, but it doesn't come out quite the way you envisioned it in your mind's eye? As someone who is pretty brand new to the world of nail stamping, I expect to make mistakes. The most important thing to me when evaluating my designs is to see the flaws, and to also see how I can avoid the same mistake in the future.

I have a couple of what I personally consider to be "nail fails" for you today. These are designs  I was excited to try out, but for different reasons I wasn't pleased with the end result.

Here is the first one:


Polishes used: Sinful Colors "Tempest" (light purple), Sinful Colors "Yolo yellow", Sinful Colors "Mardi Gras" (coral/orange), Sinful Colors "Poisonberry" (deep purple), Essie "going guru" (light green), Sally Hansen Xtreme wear in white (for stamping)

This was inspired by all the gorgeous advanced stamping people are doing with the more abstract patterns. I was excited to try it out, but the end result just isn't very pleasing to my eye. I think part of it is the open spaces on ring finger design that just look a bit empty to me, and the other part is the fact that I used a white polish for my stamping polish. When I filled it in, I found that white polish is not very forgiving. My mistakes were really obvious, where a black polish would have hidden them a bit better. I think there's something a little off about the color palette I chose, too. 

Here's the plate I used:



My second nail fail was one I was a bit sad about, only because I spent so much time making this mistake. 

I really love Bundlemonster's Fuzzy and Ferocious collection, so I was excited to use BM-S165, Jungle animals.

Polishes used: Sinful Colors "Call me" (dark purple), Sinful Colors "Kool as a Kukumber" (light green) Sinful Colors "Yolo Yellow", Sinful Colors "Tempest" (light purple), and Revelon Gel Envy "High Stakes" (dark green)

The adorable elephant! That swimming hippo! I thought that Sinful Colors "Call me" would add depth and round out my color pallette. Unfortunately, I didn't consider how dark that polish is and the fact that the black stamping on top of it would get totally lost. I also haven't tried advanced stamping over a dark polish before, and I have now learned that it's not the best idea. The lighter polishes have a hard time popping out with dark polish behind them. You could use a white polish underneath to help that, but the black details would still get lost against the dark background.

I did really love how the stamping over the light green (which is Sinful Colors "Kool as a Kukumber") turned out.  I was tempted to remove just the purple nails and keep the green, maybe paint them in the purple and yellow from the flowers, but in the end I decided to just try something completely different for my next mani. 




Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Desert Dwellers

Hi all! Today I have a desert inspired mani using bundlemonster's BM-S168, "Desert Dwellers" from the Fuzzy and Ferocious set 2. I just love all the cute animals on the plates in this collection- they are a lot of fun to color in. For the southwest image on my green nails, I used a born pretty XL plate, BP-L009. It has a lot of fun southwest inspired designs.

Because sometimes I want to use all the images, but I don't really want to spend hours stamping, I do different images on each hand. I had a bit of a hard time getting the southwest design centered-  I guess I need more stamping practice.

For the main green color I used Essie "Going Guru", and the terra cotta color is Essie "Taj-ma-haul". I also stamped over the green with "Taj-ma-haul". I basically grabbed a bunch of random greens from my collection to color in the desert images with, along with a couple of pinks for the cactus flowers.