Lilac Nails (with Pictorial)

Hello world! This is the design I've chosen to do with the weekly nail polish challenge (#WNAC2015) for the week of August 21st. This week's colour theme is mint and lilac, so I chose to do lilac floral nails, with little mint-green coloured leaves. I love lilac flowers, they always smell so amazing! They're actually one of the things I look forward to the most during spring time. It's really too bad that these nails don't smell as great as the real thing.

The picture just doesn't do these nails and justice! The colours are just so much more dull in the pictures

For the past few weeks I've been working exclusively with nail polish instead of my usual acrylic paints, and I don't think I've adjusted to it quite yet. I find that acrylic paints are just so much more versatile because the globs of nail polish just dry out way too fast for my liking. On the other hand though, using nail polish gives you nicer colours because using acrylic pain tends to give a very dull finish (even with a shiny top coat). Maybe I'll write a blog post comparing acrylic paint to nail polish after I give nail polish some more tries.

Here are my tips and tricks on how to create your very own lilac nails:

• Keep in mind that this design will suit any nail shape but will require more surface areas so it is more suitable for longer nails
• Start off with a solid white base coat (I used NYC's French White Tip)
• Paint the flowers in bunches using a very thin brush (I used a size 10/0 brush), most of my flowers are have either 4 or 5 petals. The polish I used here is NYC's Lexington Lilac
• To fill up some of the negative space between the larger flowers, paint random peals and use very small dots
• If you want to kick it up a notch, mix some of you lilac polish with white and highlight some of the flowers
• Lastly, paint the leaves (I used NYC's Tudor City teal) around the base of the bunch of flowers with a couple of connecting stems