Neon Watercolors

I know I’ve mentioned my new stamps before and I just LOVE them. These nails were inspired by the most adorable plate of monsters. Or aliens. Or maybe animated germs?

These plates are ridiculously reflective; you can see my phone and the fact that I just showered and my hair is wrapped up in a towel!

Adorable, right? Like seriously, just looking at these makes me happy. I knew I wanted to stamp these on top of neons and I knew I wanted those neons to be kind of blotched on. I originally was going to sponge on different neons, but I ended up deciding to try the watercolor technique. It’s actually a really easy technique–all you do is put small dots of the polish colors you want to use and then swirl them around the nail with a brush you have dipped in acetone. I couldn’t find any of my blue neon polishes (found them later when I cleaned my room, of course), so I ended up using a highlighter yellow, a neon pink and a bright green from the Spoiled line (which I have only seen at CVS). These polishes are all very sheer, which may have actually worked well with the watercoloring. Having never used this method with anything else, I cannot be sure.

Since pink and green are complementary colors, I found it worked best to watercolor the green by itself first, then do the pink and yellow at the same time. Of course, I didn’t figure this out until I did my right hand, but oh well.

I picked up a few things along the way. While you could do more than one nail at a time (put all the drops on at once and then swirl each of them), when the dots had a longer time to dry, their outlines would be more visible and only the middles would get swirled around. So if you are trying to avoid that, I’d recommend doing one nail at a time and one color at a time even.

right hand, which I prefered because the nails were more uniform and the green blended less with the pink.

Left hand. I actually re-did the middle finger because the pink and green blending the first time made it look too gross to keep.

The pinky on my left hand I actually did by being lazy; when each other nail was finished, I just spotted the paint left on my brush onto the pinky. It looks pretty cool still, just very muted.

I left these for about a day, purely because of artistic guilt, if that is even a thing. I felt like they looked nice and that I OUGHT to leave them alone, even though I really just wanted to stamp little monsters on them. So by the next day I had had enough of “displaying my art” and I did!

I adore that full nail stamp! You can also see how I started my process using a neon purple, but dropped it after I did my thumb. Too much going on.

I just love these little guys. It’s like having little friends on my nails all day! Is that a sad thing to be excited about having? Inanimate monster friends?