Lavender Floral Nails (with Pictorial)

Bonjour mes amis, this week sure flew by fast! Before I knew it, it was Thursday night again and my nails were bare. My boyfriend was kind enough to help me bring my storage bin of  nail polish over to his place and let me do my nails there. As usual I had absolutely no idea of what I wanted to do for the design this week, so I let my hands take over and let my mind wander elsewhere. Well, this is what the end result looks like, and quite frankly, I am very satisfied with the result.

This design actually combines a lot of the different techniques that I've been really enjoying lately; negative space, striping and detailed florals. I think all of these elements combined beautifully in this manicure despite the large contrasts between the accent nails and the other nails. I actually think that both the nail designs displayed in this week's manicure would make great accent nails on their own.

Out of all my nails this week, I'd have to say that my thumb nail (on my left hand) was the most well done. Of course, I am still practicing all of these techniques and I am still trying to get used to using just nail polish as a medium. But they say that practice makes perfect and I shall keep practicing with using polish as my medium. 

Now, without further ado... Here are my tips and tricks on how to create your own version of this manicure:

To paint the accent nail:

• Paint your accent nails a opaque pastel lavender colour (I used a polish from the Simply Sweet Vintage Glam collection)
• Use a thin brush (I used a 10/0 round brush that I bought at an art store) to paint small flower shapes in a lavender polish (Pure Ice's Jail Bait), they don't have to be the identical size or shape. Space them out accordingly
• Using the same brush, go over and paint small petals of the flower in a darker shade (I mixed in some black polish with my purple) to start and build and define the definition
• Highlight the petals of the flower using a lighter shade of lavender, I did this by mixing some white polish with the base colour of the flower
• Finish off your design by adding long green petals (I used another polish from Simply Sweet's Vintage Glam collecion) to the base of the flowers. If you want more definition in your design, shade and highlight your leaves, but make sure to keep the leaves thin.

To paint the rest of the nails:

• Paint the tips of your nails a lavender colour in the shape of a heart aka heart shaped french tips
• using a striper brush, gently add the stripes as shown above, making sure to keep your lines thin (you make choose to taper the lines toward the bottom of your nails)
• I also added a large acrylic half pearl to each of these nails to make them pop even more!