Winter Stone Nails.

It's finals week (or weeks as it happens to be at my school) and one of my final projects was all about nail art. Part of the project involved a how-to section, and the design I thought would be easy and fun to teach was water spotting. Instead of teaching off a water spotted manicure I've done on the past I decided to do a new one using nice icy winter colors.

The polishes I used were Wet n Wild French White Creme, CND Asphalt, and Color Club Lumin-icecent. The white was my base color and then I water spotted with the CND and Color Club polishes over top.

The project also involved doing nail art on a few other people. Here are the manicures I did for them that I instagrammed earlier in the week. I especially liked the one on top, I'll have to break out my striping tape again soon!

In other news, I can't promise too many more posts during the rest of December because of finals and holiday busyness. However, I've decided that since last year I enjoyed my attempt to post everyday in December, I'll do the same thing for January. So, come January 2014 I'm planning to post nail art everyday. Feel free to let me know if there are any manicures in particular you would like to see during that time! 

Metallic Stone Nails.

For today's manicure I played around with the water spotting technique and hoped for the best because I wasn't sure if it would turn out!

Before I explain what I did differently, here is a video on how you would typically do water spotting. This is still pretty accurate to what I did (although I started with a solid base color and used a body spray not hand sanitizer,) the only difference was I repeated the process multiple time. I did the technique with white polish first, and then again with a metallic color, and then again with black. 

Something else I did differently as opposed to the last time I tried this technique, was to create a thin veining look instead of more circurlar-ish shapes. I just sprayed a bit more body spray this time and was able to get the look I wanted.

The main polishes I used for this design were CND Oilslick and Color Club Lumin-Icent.

I ended up being super happy with these nails and kept them on a few days longer than I typically would have!

Glitzy Turquoise Stone Nails.

During my hiatus I saw a lot of water spotted nails and knew I needed to try it, but I wasn't doing much nail art, so I've just recently gotten around to giving it a shot! I knew I wanted to create a turquoise stone design with water spotting and I loved how it turned out. 

I read a few different techniques for water spotting; some people used hand sanitizer, some hairspray, others perfume. When I first attempted it I started with hairspray but didn't have a ton of luck. I ended up switching to using body spray to create the veining for the stones, and from there everything worked out without any issues.

The turquoise color I used was BK Candy 06, the black was Wet n Wild Black Creme, and the gold is Orly Rage.

As I said I was very happy with the results, and I was very pleased to find water spotting is easy to do. I already have plenty of ideas for other manicures using this technique!