Teal gradient with floral stamping

One of the nail art groups I belong to on Facebook is starting a new weekly challenge and I’m excited to participate! They used to have two challenges, the Tri-polish challenge, where you painted different designs with the same color scheme of three all month, (which I participated in once…ever) and the Golden Oldie challenge, where you used one of your favorite older polishes. And actually there might have been an untried polish thing going on for a while. I wasn’t as much into the old and new polish themes, because, well, they weren’t so much of a “challenge” to me. My favorite part of a challenge is trying to use the prompt to create something new and different from my brain, although I am certainly more creative on some days more than I am on others.

Now, the group has combined into a single “Pick and Mix” Challenge where the prompt each week is a pattern and a color. You can do one, you can do both, any way you want to. And I love it. I think most weeks I’ll do both, but I love all the options this gives, while still keeping somewhat coherent and organized! I’m excited to start! Part of the excitement comes from the fact that the page tells me NOT TO SHARE the prompts outside of the group, so I feel very elite and exclusive.

This week the prompt is “Two color Gradient” for the pattern and “teal” for the color. Luckily for me, I have a manicure in my vault that fits perfectly. My inspiration for this manicure came from the fact that I own tons and tons of stamping plates and RARELY ever use them. I think it’s because they always feel so flat compared to the designs I do free-hand. However, I now see all the cool things people do with stamps, by using multiple stamps, making decals, or embellishing with paint on top and I finally got inspired to actually pull out my binder full of stamping plates. I was also inspired by my new Illamasqua nail polish!

I decided to stamp over a gradient, as I have seen some very beautiful things done with the combination of those two very simple techniques. Then I embellished that with some gold and teal glitter polishes and I ended up quite liking the result!

It’s not the most perfect stamping, but it’s still better than my usual!

I don’t have a ton of quality photos of this, because I believe I was also going through a phase where I decided that I was not going to use the automatic settings on my camera because I was “going to learn how to REALLY use a camera, gosh darnit!”. Hence only 2 photos from the whole lot were even salvageable. I might have also been experimenting with my lighting set-up at the same time. 7th grade science taught me to only change one variable at a time in an experiment, but did I heed their warnings? No, I did not.

Anyway, enjoy the other ladies’ manicures inspired by either “teal” or “two color gradient” or some combination thereof!