Recently, a few sort of weird things have happened with me as far as nail art is concerned. First, I'm much more willing to do sheer or negative space designs where you can see my natural nail through the nail art. And the second is that I'm a little bit more willing to grab for my nail art tools and try some hand painted designs. Now, don't get me wrong, I am NOT good at hand painting by any means, but I think that there are some simple hand painted designs like this one that don't really require skill - just a little bit of confidence and some really pretty polishes.

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I have a little bit of damage to a couple of my nail beds at the moment so I didn't want to leave them dead bare, so I started with one of coat of a sheer sort of ballet pink polish to add a little bit of camouflage. Initially, my plan with this mani was to make it a little bit more blobby, but it sort of morphed as I was painting my nails into something a little bit more swoopy - and, I mean, clearly there's a distinct difference between blobby and swoopy. (This is going off the rails at this point, but I'm committed so...) 

So far I have three of these polished from Cirque Colors with the gold fleck in them (I'm very much determined to Pokémon the f out of these polishes though, so I will 100% have them all soon) and I've struggled a little bit with how to use them. They're absolutely stunning, but I don't often just wear polish without adding nail art and I haven't really figured out the best way to utilize these as bases. BUT for this mani, they are the star and they are the nail art. 

The nice thing about this design is that there's nothing fussy about it. I just used a fine nail art brush - for this mani I used the 11mm liner brush from the NailStuff.ca Nail Art Brush Set**, which is my go to nail art brush set - and started with the swoop at the tip. I just basically drew squiggly line of polish and then filled it in right to the edge. Next, I did the same thing at the base of the nail and filled that in. The reason I did it this way was because I felt like it made it easiest so that my middle swoop would come to a bit of a point. (It makes sense in my head.) Also, because I didn't want this design to be too much much, if you will, I kept the pinkie and first finger solid using the stunning purple shade.

Once I was finished with the design, I sealed it in with a water based top coat so that it would stay crisp and then finished with a quick dry matte top coat to take down the shine and amp up the stone-like appearance of those speckled polishes. And voila!

I'm sure you can understand why I absolutely need to have all of the polishes in this finish, right? They might be a little bit tricky to figure out how to use for nail art (at least for me) but they're just so beautiful and if I can use them for mani's like this one, I absolutely will.

If you're a fellow Canadian and you're interested in trying out polishes from Cirque, I always shop Harlow & Co and have had only positive experiences every time I've shopped with them. Also, she does tend to restock Cirque pretty consistently, so if something you're interested in is sold out I would recommend checking out the Harlow Facebook group to watch for restocks.

Thanks for reading!