Admittedly, I'm a bit neurotic when it comes to how I approach creating nail art to post here on the blog. I rarely feel good about posting something that doesn't have some sort of creativity on my part or some kind of technique that could be of value to someone else. This particular mani actually came about because I looked at this image from the Pueen Marble Paradise 01 Stamping Plate* and it occurred to me that it would be pretty cool to break it up and create a sort of patchwork type of design using bits of it. And, of course, one nail with the full image because I think it gives a cool effect. 

Anyway, keep reading for more!

Because this design is so graphic and I knew I was going to be applying this stamping image in black, I decided to go with a pretty intense base polish. Honestly, I couldn't even really capture this polish effectively in photos - though the macro below does a pretty good job. Literally the first moment I saw a teaser photo of this polish, I knew I would be picking it up from June's Polish Pickup. Rogue Lacquer's Nostalgic Nights is a neon purple crelly packed full of pink, orange, red and gold glass flakes and it's just... I mean... Insert heart eyes here. It's a stunner and I just knew that it would sing under this design.

For this mani, I applied two coats of Nostalgic Nights to all of my nails and then once those were dry I applied one coat of a glitter smoothing top coat just to make sure that I had a nice smooth surface for my stamping.

The reason that I chose this particular stamping image for this design is because I felt like it would work beautifully broken up into smaller parts and I think in the end that turned out to be true. My initial plan was to have my two middle fingers with the full image and then only the outer nails being partial, but I actually tried that and I didn't end up liking how it looked so I took off my middle finger polish and started again and I'm so, so, so glad that I did. 

The trick when it comes to this style of design where you're removing part of the stamping image is that you have to work fairly quickly. I decided before picking up the image which part I was going to use for each nail and then used the upper edge of my lint roller to remove the excess. This image was a little bit fussy when it came to removing the excess, but in the end everything did end up transferring really smoothly. For my middle finger, I actually did each section of stamping individually and did my best to keep balance in mind when choosing which bits I was going to use to create the design.

Once I was happy with my stamping, I cleaned up the edges and then sealed everything in with a nail art top coat. I finished the mani with a generous layer of glossy top coat for shine and volume and voila!

I have to say, I'm just so thrilled with how this mani turned out at the end of the day. I really think that when you slightly shift the way that you think about how to use nail art tools, you can really open up a whole world of possibility when it comes to what you can create. 

As stated above, this post is in partnership with Pueen Cosmetics and I've been so enjoying trying out more and more of their products recently. All of the Pueen products that I used in this mani are available on Amazon and I highly recommend checking them out!

Thanks for reading!