So I had this idea... I was looking through the stamping plates in my collection that I could pull out to use for the rest of the summer and I grabbed for the Whats Up Nails B056 Coasting To The Sea plate and had the idea of doing something with sea creatures.. Under The Sea, if you will. And then my brain was like... UNDER THE GALAX-SEA, as brains do from time to time, and immediately an idea started to form. There really is sort of something that feels... sort of the same when you think about space and the deep sea, so it kind of made sense in my head to combine the two. And this is what happened!

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Being that I've only done a galaxy mani once before, it's not something I feel entirely comfortable with, but I decided to keep it quite simple for this one. I started with a deep navy base polish, probably my favorite in my collection really, and applied one coat of it to all of my nails. Honestly, if you can get your hands on Heroine NYC's In The Deep - do it. It's amazing. Next, I decided to use stamping polishes to create the galaxy design because I didn't actually want to start with white and I figured that they would show up best over the navy base.

Using a ripped up makeup sponge, I started by dabbing blue stamping polish in a sort of loosey goosey diagonal line near the center of each nail. I really, really tried not to be too precious with this part and with my placement because I really do feel like this is the sort of design that gets ruined by being too fussy and perfect with it. Next, I did the same thing with a bright pink stamping polish along either side of the blue line. Finally, I wanted to add some texture to the design, so I grabbed for an ultrachrome flakie topper and dabbed that on as well, mostly through the blue with a little bit bridging over onto the pink.

For the galaxy design, I obviously knew that I wanted to use sea creatures from the plate I mentioned above, but I also wanted to add some galaxy stamping as well, so I also pulled out the Whats Up Nails B068 Totally Spaced Out plate as well and started my design with this sort of swirling stars image from that plate. Now, this part was actually a little bit tricky because I didn't want the part of the image I used to be quite as curved as it was on the plate, so I had to be really careful when applying it as I sort of turned the stamper to straighten out design into more of a line on the nails.

Once I was happy with the galaxy part of the design, I went in with the sea creatures. For my middle finger and thumb (not pictured) I used the tentacles of a large octopus image. For my pointer finger, I used a sea turtle. For my ring finger I actually isolate a fish and a jellyfish from a full coverage image because I wanted two smaller creatures. And finally, for the pinkie, I did a sea horse image.

Once I was happy with the design, I sealed it in with a nail art top coat and then followed with a quick dry glossy top coat. I did have a little bit of bleeding from the pink stamping polish (that one does always tend to bleed on me a little bit) but I think it still worked out pretty okay. Voila? Voila!

Honestly, I'm pretty stoked that I thought of this idea because I think it's fun and definitely outside of anything I've tried before. Also, I think that it shows that you can use your stamping plates a little bit differently than intended or than is maybe obvious in order to create different looks. Honestly, that's currently one of my favorite things to do nail art wise - find new and different ways to use stamping to create new designs.

Be sure to check out my tutorial video on this mani over on Instagram @pblnails!

Thanks for reading!