Challenge Your Nail Art: Christmas- "Peace on Earth"

Hello Readers!


Today's prompt is the final prompt for the December challenge for the Challenge Your Nail Art group on Facebook. So, appropriately, we are doing Christmas nails! My inspiration for this mani comes from a dupe of a MoYou London plate, which is ironically part of the Greek Mythology collection, but to me it seemed perfect for a Christmas design.

For this mani, I started with a base of 2 coats of Essie "Saltwater Happy." Then I stamped over that with "Mercury Baseline" and a music note pattern to give myself a little bit of a background to work with. I thought the music notes would go nicely with the image of the angel playing the trumpet.

My music notes come from this MoYou London plate from the Rockstar collection. I love all the different music patterns on this plate! I was drawn to the plate because I am a musician, but I find myself using the music images in more nail art than just straight music themed manis. (This one, for example.)

So, as I mentioned, the mani images for this mani are from a MoYou London dupe that I got off of Aliexpress. The original plate is from the Greek Mythology collection. 

Something funny I've noticed about the dupes is they are a heck of a lot easier to photograph than the real deal. My guess is it's because real MoYou plates are more deeply etched so the etched part doesn't show up as brightly? Or maybe the coloring on them is just different? Anyway, this particular dupe has some major differences when it comes to the nitty gritty details, especially the muses faces. The real deal has beautifully detailed eyes, and the eyes don't quite make it up to that standard on the dupe.

I mostly bought the dupe for the globe and swan images, but I realized that the muses and their musical instruments would make great angels for a Christmas look. I decided to use the trumputer to represent the Angels singing in the classic nativity scene, and the globe to represent "joy to the world- and peace on earth".

I think my favorite part of the whole manicure is the thumb. I love that girl with the globe! I decided to leave this image on my stamper head while I was making the decal instead of making it on my silicone mat as I do with most decals, because I've noticed that images that have large areas to fill in are prone to warping when you peel them off the silicone mat, especially if you are just a little impatient- as I am- and try to peel them off -just- a little bit too early.