I've been doing so much abstract nail art lately that for this week's #CBBxManiMonday, I decided to shift gears a little bit and do a mani that I've had in my head for a while and really wanted to do for spring. Admittedly, I did fudge the flowers theme a little bit since this is definitely a little bit more in the grassy and butterflies zone, but I don't think it's enough of a fudge to not get away with it. (Also, I may or may not have had another mani I had hoped to get done this weekend in mind, but ran out of time...) 

Anyway, without further ado, keep reading for more about this mani!

Even casual readers of this blog will not be the least bit surprised that I've got another abstract mani here today - I'm currently obsessed. I do try, though, to keep each mani I post here from being too samey, though I do think there are some elements that are getting a lot of play across different mani's. One thing I had yet to try was a French style abstract mani and it took a little bit of brainstorming before I landed on what I wanted to do with the design, but I'm absolutely smitten with how it turned out.

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I think sometimes I forget that I don't have to make things complicated in order to make them impactful. Sometimes it's those fairly easy to put together mani's that end up being both my and other people's favorites. That being said, I do like to be thoughtful when it comes to putting together nail art designs, especially ones that I'll be posting here on the blog, so for this one I ended up adding some visual interest with some subtle drybrushing over a gorgeous base polish as well as some thoughtful placement of my stamping and... I'm sort of obsessed!

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Full disclosure - as I write this post, I'm subsisting on 3 hours of sleep and the laziest determination of life after being kept up most of the night by my dog who is very, very itchy at the moment because of her allergies. Anyway, for this week's Floral themed #CBBxManiMonday, I tried something sort of silly but I think it actually worked sort of beautifully - much more so than I was expecting, if we're being honest. I called this design "Blobby" because that is literally what it is - blobs of polish on a sheer base with some high contrast stamping. And I kind of love it!

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More often than I might like to admit, the mani you see here on the blog is my second try at the design. What happens sometimes is that I finish a mani, take pictures, and then realize that I should have done something differently and it just... isn't what it could be. Now, I could probably be less of a perfectionist, but there have been so many times where the second attempt was in a completely different league from the first that I generally just go again and hope for the best. Today's mani is one of these instances. I tried it the first time and it was... fine. It was good, even, probably, but I sort of couldn't help seeing all of the things that I wished I had done differently every time I looked at it, so I just had to give it another go and I'm entirely in love with how it turned out. Let this be the lesson - sometimes good enough is worth improving if you have the time and energy to give it a go.

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With today's mani, something pretty rare happened to bring it all together. Most often, I sit down with a simple mani in mind and then my goblin brain is like "MORE MORE MORE", but with this one I actually had a much more involved idea in mind but once I got to the point just before I ended up top coating this one, I realized that it was exactly where I wanted to leave it. There was just... something about it that I loved immediately - and I wanted to share it here on the blog because I feel like this type of mani could very easily be recreated regardless of your experience with nail art and since it was those types of manis that drew me into nail art because I felt confident I could do them, I like to share ideas and maybe inspire others to believe they can as well. 

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Our march theme for #CBBxManiMonday is Floral and I have to admit that I was a little stumped on what I was going to do since I went so hard earlier in the season with floral nails. In the end, though, I decided to lean into where my mind is sort of stuck at this point - abstract nails - and add in a floral element. It's a bit of a fudge, but... that's what you do when you have free reign with a theme, right? I mean.. right??? Anyway, I grabbed for my current favorite stamping plate and some must have indie polishes and I just... sort of went for it. 

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One of the cool things about stamping for nail art is that a little bit of creativity in the way that you use different stamping images can go a really, really long way. There are a few artists whose work always blows my mind in the way that they use stamping in ways that hadn't even occurred to me. When I sat down to do today's mani, I went in with the idea that I wanted to keep it fairly simple, perhaps even minimalist, and I wanted to reach for one of the new plates in my collection that I hadn't gotten the chance to use yet. I wasn't until I was sitting there staring at three plates that still had their blue film on them that inspiration struck and I decided to use two really simple stamping images in a way I'd never thought of to create a mani that I think turned out pretty great. 

So without further ado, let's get into it!