And Now For Something Completely Different; Accidental Freehand

Hello Readers!


Today's post was born as a #clairestelle8challenge post, and became something totally unexpected for me. The prompt was "spring flowers", and I feel like I've done a lot of spring floral manis and was fresh out of inspiration for that prompt, so I decided to go browsing on google images and found some really beautiful stuff. I fell in love with a watercolor image but didn't think I had much of a prayer of replicating it using stamping, so I decided to set a course of "assisted freehand", where I basically paint over stamped images.

...this is how it turned out. I'm not sure if this is ok or not, lol. I think it's ok, but freehand florals are not something I really have enough experience in to decide this. In any case, I'm not totally in love with how it...

Find this painting at dreamstime

Here is the beautiful inspiration piece. I fell in love with it and decided it was worth going out on a limb for. Of course, the flowers here are watercolor and I did not attempt a watercolor technique with this mani, so that's a big difference.

Also, I used a million polishes in this mani. Too many to list them all out, I think. So I'm featuring what I used for the background.

I started with two coats of Strawberry Milk on my pointer/pinky fingers, and three of Lemon Heaven on my ring/middle. Then I used cut up pieces of sponge to add more of those colors plus Silhouette until I had a background that somewhat resembled the watercolor. I added a layer of Pinksicle over that to blend the colors as well as add some shimmer.

Bundle Monster Secret Garden
BM-709

Bundle Monster Secret Garden
BM-713

So for my "assisted" part of the freehand, I stamped a couple of flower images with white polish over my background. I thought I would just trace over them with the polish. I ended up ignoring them for the most part, however, as they were hard to see, especially where they overlapped. BUT, I did find them helpful to create the profile-view flowers sticking out from the top, as well as for a guide to show me what area of the nail I wanted the flowers to cover.

 So, there you go: my first attempt at a sort of free-hand floral. What do you guys think?