Showing posts with label Stamping decals. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

by Kitties26 on Tuesday, December 22, 2015 15 comments

Stamping decals with Pretty Serious and DRK

I have plenty of manis to share here, but I can't help but feeling like nail blogs are becoming a little irrelevant these days with Instragram pretty much taking over. That of course makes me pretty uninterested in posting much here. Of course blogs are way better for historical purposes, if you are looking for swatches and reviews or for specific nail art, but my blog views have really dropped off over the last 12-18 months compared to where they used to be and I'm feeling pretty 'meh' about it all really.

I did always say that the purpose of my blog was for my nail polish chronicles, and if other people get something out of it then great. What do you guys think, are blogs becoming irrelevant?

Anyway, let's look at today's mani, which I created using some of the polishes from the Pretty Serious Christmas collection. The silver is Frosty the Snowborg, red is Santa's Sunburn and the green is Hack the Halls. The polishes are all so gorgeous and I will be doing some swatches during the upcoming holiday season.

I created a stamping decal using DRK Designer plate 1 stamping plate, which has lots of symmetrical designs that can easily be coloured in for stamping decals.

Stamping plate provided for consideration, polishes purchased by me.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

by Kitties26 on Thursday, July 30, 2015 6 comments

Vinyls and stamping decals

Every now and then I do a design where I even impress the pants off myself! I pride myself on my nails always looking pretty fine, but this was one time where I told myself, girl - you really nailed this shit today!

This nail art look was a combo of nail vinyls and then stamping decals. The white base is Face of Australia Miss Congeniality (one coat). I then used the zigzag design nail vinyls from Xroma Polish and Vinyls. While they were drying, I prepared some stamping decals using the butterflies from Messy Mansion Plate MM42. I coloured the decals in using three of the Pipedream ANIVC neons.

Tonight you get two tutorial instavideos! First one creating the stamping decals and then one showing the vinyls and decal application. Enjoy.

A video posted by More Nail Polish Blog - Cathy (@morenailpolish) on Jul 29, 2015 at 6:04am PDT

A video posted by More Nail Polish Blog - Cathy (@morenailpolish) on Jul 29, 2015 at 2:21pm PDT

Saturday, February 14, 2015

by Kitties26 on Saturday, February 14, 2015 6 comments

Hearts for Valentine's Day

It's the early evening here in Australia on Valentine's day, and our day has been anything but romantic. We woke up early to go to the other side of town our our little league t-ball game. Then straight home to change clothes and out to a birthday party for one of my sons friends. Attend party for two hours, then drive to another party for another friend of my sons. Attend party for two hours, then find where my husband was with our daughter and catch up with them. We didn't get home until around 6pm. There goes another potential day for swatching! Maybe we might cuddle up on the sofa tonight and watch a movie or something.

Despite our non romantic day, I did have some pretty lovey dovey nails. I used two coats of Smitten Polish Nose so bright which is a incredible red holo! It's super pigmented, so I ensured I had a good base coat on. On my middle two fingers I did a base of Anna Gorelova The Snow Maiden from the winter collection. I'll have swatches of that polish for you soon, as it's a stunning white scattered holo!

I did some advanced stamping using the hearts pattern from a Bundle Monster plate. I stamped in black and then coloured it in around the hearts, on the stamper using Nose so bright. When that was dry, I applied a coat of top coat to the nail and let it dry for about 1 minute. I then pressed the stamper onto my nail to transfer both the red and stamping onto the nails, leaving the white to show through in the middle of the hearts.

I love how this turned out.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

by Kitties26 on Saturday, December 06, 2014 3 comments

Matchy-matchy is the way to go.

Hey there everyone. How are you going with the start of the silly season? I'm feeling pretty wiped out from burning the candle at both ends. I just returned from a whirlwind trip up to Noosa, Queensland yesterday and back to Canberra this evening. We were there to attend a friends wedding, which was lovely. We managed to miss the tropical storms too which was a bonus.

These are the nails I wore for the wedding, and I did some serious matchy, matchy work with these.

The base is a slight blue to white gradient at the two third mark of my nail. I used Picture Polish Swagger and Bright White. I then did some advanced stamping using Mundo de Unas black stamping polish and coloured it in with white polish and Picture Polish Sizzle.

I just wore a long maxi dress, which was perfect for the beach wedding. The dress had a blue to white gradient and then lots of black and pink filigree detail on the hem. This was the only decent picture I manged to stamp with with my dress in the background, but you can see how the colours popped. I received so many compliments from other wedding guests about my nails, I definetly think I'll be sticking with the matchy, matchy theme again.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

by Kitties26 on Tuesday, September 16, 2014 3 comments

31DC2014: Geometric

I can't believe we are at the halfway point in the 31 Day Challenge already! Top effort girls who are all still hanging in there.

Tonight's prompt is Geometric, which this year has changed from Tribal. Sarah from Chalkboard Nails made the change in an effort to be more culturally sensitive, which I think is a fantastic idea. In many cultures, tribal art is a should only be painted by those from that culture, I certainly know that is the case with Aboriginal dot paintings.

So without further adieu, here are my geometric nails.

I did advanced stamping on all ten nails. I used a fantastic geometric design from one of the new Emily de Molly plates EdM09. I painted the design with a range of colours, the blue is Picture Polish Swagger, and the rest of the colours are from the China Glaze Sunsational collection.

Remember my full pro set of stampers heads from Messy Mansion? This is what they are perfect for. I was able to paint in each of the stamps all at the same time and it made the process so much faster.

An InLinkz Link-up

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My tribal nails from 2013!

Now I don't often do shout outs, but in other news last night, a fellow Aussie and long time reader of my blog was selected as one of the 14 finalists in the Rescue Beauty Lounge Fan Collection 3.0 competition. As a fellow Aussie, I can't help but love her inspiration (which I have copied below)

She is finalist #8 and it would be awesome if you could send her a vote - especially all you Aussies out there - lets keep Angela in the top six! You don't need to sign up to anything to vote, but you can only vote once per IP address.

Thanks from me, and I'm sure a millions thanks from Angela. --> Vote NOW

Monday, August 18, 2014

by Kitties26 on Monday, August 18, 2014 5 comments

Aqua pebble stones

I love finding new plate designs that work well with advanced stamping or stamping decals. With my recent rediscovery of my FUN plates I found this beauty on FUN #6. It looks like a little pebble stones. I didn't have the patience to colour in every single little stone in the design, but I really love how it turned out with just a sprinkling of colour.

I used Face of Australia Mystique (the darkest teal shade) and Picture Polish Marine, Chillax and Tiffany for each shade getting lighter. The gradient used the same polishes over a white base. Lastly I added some SS9 sized Swarovski crystals on the tips of the gradients.

This was the first full mani I did using the Messy Mansion 10 stamper head pro set. For the finer lines in this stamp I found I did need to lightly prime my stampers using the included magic eraser from the set. As you can see, the stamps picked up really beautifully.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

by Kitties26 on Sunday, August 17, 2014 7 comments

M&Ms yumm yumm

At the moment I have all my stamping plates spread across various storage folders. My Bundle Monster and Pueen plates are in a zippered holder from Bundle Monster. My MoYou plates are in a zippered makeup pouch. My Messy Mansion and Emily de Molly plates are also in a zippered makeup pouch. Then I have a few other larger plates, like DRK and FUN plates that are in a large folder. My large folders were on top of my helmers, and over time, other crap had piled on top of them. This meant I totally forgot I had these plates.

I recently cleaned up enough to pull out the plates and saw this M&M design on FUN 7 plate. I had tried using this plate for advanced stamping the very first time I attempted advanced stamping, and given that you never saw that mani, you can believe me that it was a complete fail! Having done a bunch of advanced stamping now, I was feeling much more confident to attempt it again.

I still managed to smoosh the middle finger design as I put it on my finger, stretching out the blue M, but other than that I was really happy with how these came out. I think I'll just pretend that blue one is a peanut M&M.

I used a whole bunch of Ulta3 polishes for this, cloud nine for the base and honolulu, blue heaven, sizzling red, chocolate cake, emerald intensity and mango mayhem for the M&Ms. Black stamping polish is from Mundo de Unas.

I singled out the red and yellow M&Ms because of the two main M&M characters, I just wish that I had smooshed the yellow one out into the peanut shape.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

by Kitties26 on Wednesday, August 13, 2014 8 comments

Burnt Ambition with advanced stamping

Last week I did a blue and white gradient mani with some advanced stamping on top. I received lots of requests to a tutorial so I created another version of the mani and filmed it as I did it.

For my base I did a holo gradient using two new polishes, Colors by Llrowe Burnt Sugar and Blonde Ambition. The brown stamping polish was actually a colour I mixed up using some of my Mundo de Unas polishes. The MdU polishes mix perfectly, so in reality you really only need black, white and the three primary colours. I made this brown shade by mixing red and green and then a tiny dot of black to darken it up. I filled in the flowers using OPI Don't Pretzel by Buttons.

Here is my 15 second Instagram tutorial on how I did the advanced stamping flowers. I used my new set of Messy Mansion Stamper heads which made the process so quick and easy.

Here are the individual swatches of the two polishes I used for the holo gradient. This first one is Colors by Llarowe Blonde Ambition. Its a stunning golden beige colour with a fantastically strong holo flame. I saw this polish over at Fingers Polish Mania and I had to buy it. Luckily for me there was a restock that next weekend and I managed to pick up my first Colors by Llarowe. Based on these two polishes, I'm very happy and impressed with the polishes. There is definitely an Aussie indie feel to them, and I suspect she sources her bottles and mani ingredients through the same Aussie distributor.

Color by Llarowe Burnt Sugar is a delicious chocolate brown holographic polish. The holo flame isn't as strong as in Blonde Ambition, but it's still very visible. This is a lovely rich shade of brown and it's the sort of brown polish that just makes you fall in love with browns.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

by Kitties26 on Thursday, August 07, 2014 13 comments

Gradient with advanced stamping, inspired by ModCloth dresses

I've done another design following some inspiration on the Modcloth website. This time I used a dress called Cool Breeze.

I started with a white base and then sponged on some navy blue tips. My blue polish was a little more green toned than the blue in the dress, but they still matched nicely.

I then did some advanced stamping, or reverse stamping (I'm still not sure which is the right term for this) where you stamp onto the stamper, then colour it in with some polish. After that has dried, you apply a layer of top coat, wait for it to be 90% dry, and then press the stamp on. The main difference between this technique and creating stamping decals is that you don't top coat the design on the stamper and peel it off like you do with decals. The flower I used are from Moyou Suki 01 plate.

I really like how this one turned out. I think I need to get some more stamping plates with flowers on them, I don't seem to have many designs with flowers.