A Jewel Among Stones

Hello and good day! :)

Sometimes inspiration for nail designs come from places we'd never expect. I suppose this is true of any form of art--seeing the world in a different way lends itself to artistic expression. With that in mind, here's what's on my tips today:

Indoors with flash

The inspiration, funnily enough, was the bed of rather ordinary stones that sits between our back garden sitting area and the rest of the yard. It is filled with rocks in white and varying shades of brown...

yep, took a photo of the rocks for you. How dreadfully boring, eh?

Quite common, but it reminded me of a "pebble manicure" I saw the lovely Meliney demonstrate on YouTube a while back. (Watch it here--it's really cool!) I decided to recreate this idea on a couple of accent nails, while also showing off a gorgeous brown holo from Nubar called Jewel!

Outdoors in sun

Jewel is the brown scattered "chunky" holo you see on my index and small fingerails. It is a warm brown, and in the bottle, the holo particles make a more linear effect, but this doesn't come through on the nail. Instead, it's a gorgeous scattered rainbow that looks like colourful sprinkles atop an ice-cream sundae :)

It looks really textured, doesn't it? It dries quite bumpy, but I have two layers of topcoat over it in these photos. The bumps just still show through the clearcoat, despite it being glassy smooth to the touch. Almost like 3D objects encased in resin.

For the accent nails, I started with a base of OPI My Vampire Is Buff, then while that was still wet, used OPI Suzi Loves Cowboys (brown creme), Orly Pointe Blanche (white creme), Revlon #932 Copper Penny (bright copper) and of course, the same Nubar Jewel to blob on the "stones". As you can see, they didn't come out quite like the inspiration video. Maybe I did them too close together, or didn't wait long enough to add the drops. It doesn't look much like stones anymore, but I think it looks really cool! Especially where the brown and white cremes sort of mixed and faded into each other.

The whole effect reminds me of a coffee shop. Latte, mocha, cappuccino... drool...

I took a couple of un-focused pictures so you can get a better idea of the gorgeous holo in Jewel:

Just a bit out of focus--this is what you see if you look at it outside. Chocolately brown with rainbow bits.

And here's one very blurry, so you really see the explosion of colour!

So there you have it. A collection of stones, some more precious than others. ;) I hope you like this one. I really do! I want to play more with this technique using different colour schemes and see how I go. Maybe neons over black, or lots of different duochromes... so many possibilities. :D

Thanks for stopping in today. See you next time! xoxo