Happy Ash Wednesday? Since today's holiday didn't really inspire me to do any nail art, I thought I'd look forward to tomorrow, which is the start of the Chinese New Year. This is the year of the sheep or goat, and that didn't really inspire me much either, but I wanted to try a new technique that has been making the rounds of the nail artist community recently, which is the hot new trend of using alcohol-soluble inks for nail art. You can purchase the inks in bottles at craft stores, or more economically you can look in your office supplies and find permanent felt-tip markers, most commonly known under the brand name of Sharpie. What I ended up with didn't really look very Chinese New Year, but it still looks pretty cool.
I actually don't own any Sharpies per se, but I do have a set of generic permanent ink markers in an array of colors, so I pulled out the red, orange, and black ones to do this design. I started with a single coat of Barry M Mustard as my base, and applied a coat of SV to seal it in before I started with the markers.
I then used the red and orange markers to color in swathes over the nail, and used a spray bottle of alcohol to blur and marble the lines. I actually got a few different effects depending on how far out I held the spray bottle, but in the end they all sort of ran together and I got a weird color fluctuating base. I topcoated that to seal it, and then used the black marker to draw in some random jagged lines across the nails before spraying again with the alcohol to "melt" the lines a bit. When I was done, I sealed it with another coat of SV, and then finished with OPI Matte Top Coat.
This is one of those looks that went a completely different direction than I had pictured in my head, but I'm okay with that. If I get some time this weekend I'll film a tutorial on using the spray bottle to work the ink on the nail.
Hope you're all having a great week, and I'll see ya Friday!