12DOC: Santa!

Hey y'all!

Happy Sunday!  We've officially put the first week of December in the bag, and as such, today's prompt for the Challenge Your Nail Art 12 Days of Christmas Challenge should bring a few very familiar faces to you, because today we're doing Santa and/or Elves!  I know you'll be shocked by this, but I have *another* nail charm for this prompt!

I went over this design a few times before I finally settled on one I liked, and it used 4 polishes.

L-R: NYC Crystal Couture Ruby Queen, Sally Hansen OMGhost, Essie Good as Gold, OPI An Affair in Red Square

After seeing some of Anne's swatches of the Crystal Couture collection, I was psyched to find them still in stores when we went to Texas in October, so I nabbed two of them for myself.  I used 3 coats of Ruby Queen on my ring finger that were unfortunately completely covered by the Santa nail charm.  It's a gorgeous polish, and my intention was to use it on my tips as well, but it didn't want to play right when I was cleaning my lines, so I had to cut it.

Esssentially, these French Tips break down into three parts:  first, I created the original tip in OMGhost, which only needed a single coat because it's so opaque.  Second, I used a detail brush to create a second smile line below the first in An Affair in Red Square.  Third, I used a dotting tool to add graduated dots along the smile line with Good As Gold.  The dotting still needs some work: I'm aware.  Once my tips were done, though, all I had left to do was slap on a coat of SV and attach the charm!

This charm is considerably bigger than the others in that pack, which is a shame because it truly does cover up all of the gorgeousness that is Ruby Queen, so I'll have to use her in a different look another time.  However, I'm glad that for as large as the charm is, its curvature made for a lot of contact area with the nail, so it felt pretty secure.

I promise y'all I will not be using charms for the entirety of this 12-prompt challenge.  I cannot promise, however, that I do not have others which will be used before it's all said and done. ;)

For more Santa/Elf nail art looks, be sure to check out the inlinkz below.

An InLinkz Link-up

Hope you're all being safe and warm and good to one another despite all the craziness in the world lately, and I will see you tomorrow with a special nail art collaboration!