Free Comic Book Day mani.... with glitter!

Hello Readers!


I think this week in May must be the highest concentration of nearly insignificant holidays in the whole year- we had Star Wars day on Thursday, Cinco De Mayo yesterday, and today is National Free Comic Book Day, where you can march down to your local comic book store for a free sample. I don't think I've ever actually done this. However, it does also happen to be a #clairestelle8challenge day on instagram, and the prompt is "glitter". I had a new Born Pretty plate that I have really been wanting to play with, so I had this wild hair to combine comics with glitter.

Also with a new technique... glitter blocking! I'm not sure if I made this up or not, I just haven't seen it before.

I started this mani with two coats of my favorite white, Sinful Colors "Snow Me White". Since I knew I wanted to use the Sinful Colors "Pride" glitter, I chose polishes that matched the colors in the glitter particles.

I've always found this glitter slightly tricky to use, and I think it's because it matches nothing that was in the original PRIDE collection. That collection was full of bright rainbow colors, and this glitter is made of jewel tones! I love the glitter, but I'm not sure why they thought it went with that collection.

My little comic book heroes come from this Born Pretty Store plate (BP-L062). It's a newer release plate, and it is kind of fabulous. I tried to use it on a watercolor mani for this week's Nail Crazies Unite challenge, but I kind of hated it so I didn't end up publishing it. I decided to try again with glitter, and I'm glad I did because I do like this mani.


To create my pointer/pinky fingers, I first created decals with the above plate. Next, I stamped the fingers with the diagonal stripe (I just turned it so it was horizontal) from this MoYou London plate:

When my decals were nice and dry, I trimmed them down with scissors so they had a nice, straight edge and placed them onto the nail above or below the stamped stripe line. 

Next, I applied liquid latex onto my nail to cover the stamped stripes and decals, as well as my cuticles. 

Finally, I grabbed a makeup sponge and my glitter and sponged away at the exposed areas of my nails. Ta-Da! Glitter blocking. Like color blocking, but with glitter! 

After removing the liquid latex, I had to fidget with the glitter line a little, to make sure the glitter went all the way to the black line and there weren't any big gaps. I also ended up having to re-stamp one of the lines because the glitter came up over it. 

I figured speech bubbles from this MoYou London "Hipster" collection plate would be the perfect companion for my comic book characters. I did have to stamp the middle finger twice to cover the whole nail- but luckily the speech bubble stamps on this plate are designed so that you can easily do that. It would be really tricky, if not impossible, to do without a clear stamper, though!

I hope you enjoyed this mani! Will you be claiming your free comic book today? Let me know in the comments!