September Nail Art Challenge: Stamping Month! Day 6: Travel

Introduction:

Today stamping challenge is "travel". As soon as I saw it in the list, I knew what i'm going to do. I felt in love with sunset/sunrise gradient nail arts quite some time ago (my first one was with butterflies), but I really wanted to create something tropical with palm trees. I just had to by stamping plates for this (and luckily I got them right before these challenge). And three of my new Crows Toes polishes looked ideal for creating tender sunrise gradient. The only thing which I did not have was stamping image of the boat, but I fixed this problem. Honestly I'm in love with results and I even made light box to take better images. I hope you'll enjoy it as well.

Results:

Figure 1. All five nails stamped with palms on top of the gradient created with three different crows toes polishes. Image on accent nail was created using free hand drawing on the stamp followed by stamping.

Figure 2. Two more images at different light. Love stinks gives nice blue-purple shimmer.

 Figure 3. Macro images of stamping and free hand drawing on the accent nail (boat and birds).

Materials and Methods:

Nail polish: 

• Crows Toes - Toxic buttercup (1 coat)
• Crows Toes - Tequila sunrise (1 coat)
• Crows Toes - Love stinks (1 coat)
• Julep - Ava (2 base coats)
• Essie - Licorice (stamping)

Stamping plates:

• BM 315

To create sunrise background I used 2 coats of Ava followed by application of Crows Toes polish. One stroke of Love stinks, Tequila sunrise in the middle and Toxic buttercup at the tip. I did not smooth gradient using sponge technique, because polishes mixed well even without it. However on my practice nail stick I did gradient using sponge and it worked well too.

Discussion: 

As soon as I stamped palm trees, I realized that for more "travel" look boat is really essential. So I decided to draw it by hand. Since this mani was done on my right hand (and i'm right handed), drawing on the nail itself was out of question. Instead i made a tiny boat right on the stamp (around 10 attempts and only after that when I was about to give up, it finally was a right image of tiny boat) and stamped it on the nail (still surprised that this boat stamped right in place). After that I made birds the same way, but it was much easier and added islands using regular brush of  Essie Licorice polish. I'm sure that one day I'll repeat this one for my both hands.

References:

Inspiration:
Sunset and palms
Sunset gradient video tutorial
Sunset and grass
Palm tree drawing tutorial