September Nail Art Challenge: Stamping Month! Day 1: Flowers

Introduction:

This month I decided to participate in the nail art challenge proposed by Tina, which is all about various stamping themes. Also from now on I will start to make real, full size posts in this blog describing in more details my nail art. And just to add personal touch each post will be shaped in the style of scientific paper including following sections: Introduction, Results, Materials and Methods, Discussion and References :) Hope it's not too nerdy... 

 Since it's just the beginning for me, I would really appreciate your comments and suggestions for blog improvement. 

Results:

 Figure 1. All five nails stamped with two different flower patterns. This combination of yellow and purple turned out very nice for my taste, especially considering pink shimmer of background polish: Toxic Buttercup, 

  Figure 2. Accent nail, macro shot. I did not buy any special stamping polishes, just use whatever I already have. This polish Parachute Purple gives great results both for large surface coverage and tiny details.

  Figure 3. Pinky, macro shot. On this picture you can see this gorgeous pink shimmer which I really love in Toxic Buttercup. It's quite pronounced in person, but was very hard to capture on camera.

Materials and Methods:

Nail polish: 

• Dance legend - Enamel gel Effect 883
• Crows Toes - Toxic Buttercup
• Sephora+Pantone Universe - Parachute Purple

Stamping plates:

• Pueen 38
• Salon express SE-22

To create nice smooth background i decided to layer Toxic Buttercup (3 coats total) on top of the Enamel 883 (one coat). After that I applied top coat and given that total it was 6 coats of polish (including base), I also used dry fast drops. Stamping was done next day, I did not use top coat after stamping and sure enough some elements got erased fortunately only after I made pictures :)

Discussion:

You might be wondering why I used top coat before stamping and not after? I' find it very useful to seal background with a layer of top coat, especially if this was a complicated type of background (gradient or something with multiple layers). Why is it useful? Because it gives you a chance to correct stamping which went wrong. It's pretty easy to quickly remove stamped pattern from the nail, by gently wiping it with cotton ball soaked in nail polish remover. If you have a good top coat under stamping, it will give a nice protection and you can do a second stamping on the same nail without redoing entire nail from scratch. 
And it's necessary to protect your finished stamping by second layer of top coat if you want it to last. In my case I planed to change mani next day for another challenge, so putting 7th layer of polish was way too much :))

References:
Inspiration: Wonderful Tina
Polish swatches:
Toxic buttercup
Parachute
Enamel 883