Metallic Wood Grain nail art

Hey y'all!

Happy humpday to all!  Today's nail art look takes a decidedly different turn.  I really wanted to play with creating a stamping gradient.  This is where you blend different polishes on the stamping plate as you swipe, so that your resulting image blends smoothly from one color to the next.  My results on this attempt were subtle, but I think the metallic wood grain makes a really cool effect.

I chose three metallic polishes over a dark shimmer base to create my look.

L-R: Orly Galaxy Girl, Barry M Silver Foil, Essie Good As Gold and Nothing Else Metals

I began with the gorgeous Galaxy Girl, which you'll see swatched on its own this weekend.  With a deep vampy shimmer polish, I knew that my stamping had to really stand up to be noticed, so I opted for three metallic shades to try to blend over the wood grain pattern on my VL019 plate. 

To help let the metallic polishes stand out, I added a matte top coat over Galaxy Girl, and then began my stamping process (please ignore the giant dent on my ring finger - that definitely was NOT as noticeable to the naked eye!).  As I mentioned before, a stamping gradient actually blends the colors on the plate, so essentially I used a single drop of each metallic polish on the edge of the image, next to one another.  When I swiped the image, the polishes blended where they met to make a seamless transition one to the next.

The awesome thing about the Vivid Lacquer full nail images is their size - that one image is large enough that I was about to use different parts of it on each nail to create completely unique, but coherent nails.  It also helps that "wood grain" and "metallic" don't usually go together, but in this case I think it actually works.

Unfortunately my camera really wasn't able to catch the subtle shifts between the silver, gold, and lilac polishes, but you can see them if you look really carefully (and if you click on the pictures, they will expand to help you see them better).  The shifts were more obvious to the naked eye, but this is one of those subtle looks that I really dig.  The casual observer wouldn't notice it, but were anyone on the street to see it, I would know that I'd found a kindred nail polish spirit. 

I would love to hear your feedback down in the comments.  Can you see the shift?  Is this look a little too weird, even for me? 

As always, I hope you're all having a great week, and I'll see you Friday!