So, on Tuesday I geeked out a little bit with my prompt for the 12 Days of Christmas nail art challenge. Today, I'm geeking out a considerable amount more, and I'm also trying a new-to-me technique, creating home-made water decals. Our challenge was to pick one day from the 12 Days of Christmas song and use that as our prompt. After hemming and hawing for a few hours, I finally decided to give in and go with my gut, and completely twist the challenge to fit my geek needs. Ergo, I present to you the 10th Doctor (Time Lord), leaping across my nails!
When all was said and done, I only needed 3 polishes, plus top coat to pull this one off.
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| L-R: Nina Rum & Reggae, George Molten Metals No. 4 Enchanted, Barry M Jingle Bells |
Application for this look was pretty straight forward. I started with two coats of Rum & Reggae on my middle finger, and one coat of No. 4 Enchanted on the other 4. I applied my water decal (more on how I created it down below) and sealed it in with SV. I then applied one coat of Jingle Bells to the metallic mauve nails, and used a detail brush to apply the glitter around the decal to hide the very obvious lines it left during application. Everything is topped with another good dose of SV to seal it in.
So you might be able to see that I've grabbed a picture of the 10th Doctor running, slung it into my photo editing software, and added a Santa hat for some Christmas cheer.
I created many duplicates of the image on the page before printing onto transparent inkjet water slide paper. The instructions on the paper (which is intended for home crafting like making photomugs and things of that sort) said to spray it with glossy enamel and then heat the paper with a hair dryer before cutting out the image and then soaking it with water to make the image slide off. I didn't have any gloss enamel spray, so I dabbed a couple of my images with SV and tried a couple of them with no topcoat, just to see what would happen. As it turns out, the uncoated ones basically melted and smeared after soaking, and the ones topped with SV were very, very thick. I originally had other ideas for a backdrop for this decal, but they weren't going to work given how transparent the image was and how thick the decal became, so I basically just messed around with it a couple of times to get this look finished.
I'm definitely going to pick up some enamel spray and try this technique again, and hopefully get a little bit higher-resolution image to use because I lost a lot of detail in this from the computer to the water slide paper, which is a shame. In my original image, you can see his glasses and the details of his overcoat a little better.
Live and learn, amirite? In any event... to check out nail art inspired by the other lines of the song, be sure to peruse the inlinkz below.
I hope you're all having a great week, and I will see you Saturday!