If you follow the blog, you'll know by now that I've really been struggling with inspiration these past couple of months and it's been a persistent and pretty annoying thing for me since I try to put together 3 nail art designs per week to post here on the blog and on my social media. Luckily, last night I had a bit of a lightbulb moment and decided that for the month of March I'm going to lean into favorites. Favorite colors, favorite techniques, and most importantly favorite stamping images. I tend to try not to use the same images multiple times just because I like to try and make all of my mani's unique, but there are so many images that I just love and that I know I could happily use over and over again for a lot of different overall mani designs - so that's what I'm going to do!

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I feel like I say this every single time I do a gradient, but I always seem to forget just how much I love doing gradients as bases for nail art - but it's true! Also, I feel like there's something about March that tends to make me lean into gradients as well. For this gradient, I grabbed for three gorgeous polishes from two of my favorite indie brands for créme finishes, all available from one of my favorite nail polish websites - NailStuff.ca (with whom I am an affiliate.) I knew that I wanted to use Starrily's Empress in this mani - a polish that I've actually had for months now and been wanting to use more - and I ended up pairing it with Dimension Nails' Vegan Gains** and Mangrove Kingfisher** to create a gradient from soft dove grey to deep teal. These polishes are all SUPER pigmented and really build up quickly to create a gradient, which is always a plus.

For this mani, I started by applying one coat of Vegan Gains to all of my nails as my base polish and then I did two passes of sponging to build up and blend the gradient over the nails. (If you want to actually see how I did it, check out my video tutorial over on Instagram @pblnails!)

I didn't actually decide what stamping I was going to do with this mani until after I finished the gradient and that's when I had the idea to go all in on favorite stamping images this month. This swirling image from the Whats Up Nails B039 Geometric Trance Stamping Plate is an absolute stunner and really works beautifully over a gradient to create this almost ethereal sort of vibe to the design. I ultimately decided to keep the stamping quite simple, applying the same image to all of my nails but alternating the direction of placement to get a little bit more overall interest to the design.

Once I was happy with my stamping, I cleaned up with a brush dipped in acetone and then sealed in my stamping with a nail art top coat. To finish, I applied a generous coat of my favorite glossy top coat to all of my nails and voila!

Honestly, I haven't been as excited about nail art as I am now that I have a plan for what I'm going to do coming up. I'm actually planning to make a list of all of the stamping images that jump out at me from my collection and previous designs and then doing some playing around to figure out how to create completely different designs using them. We'll see how it goes!

Be sure to head over to @pblnails and follow me there to see video tutorials for all of my nail designs!

Thanks for reading!