MANI MONDAY: Raspberry Holo Leopard Print Nails
For this week's Mani Monday, I teamed up with Jayne and Renee again to put together leopard print manicures inspired by the mani Jayne did a couple of weeks ago for our ombré theme. I have to admit, I've always wanted to try a leopard print, but my fear of hand anything hand painted has kept me from trying it out. I needn't have worried, though, because the nature of this manicure being a little bit... well, blobby, really, means that you don't have to be too precious about perfection.
I actually tried a few different colour combinations when I was doing this mani and I struggled to find the right contrast and colour pairings, but I'm ultimately pretty thrilled about the polishes that I picked in the end. For the background of the two middle nails, I used Color Club Miss Bliss, which is a really pretty pink linear holo from their Halo Hues collection. For the two outer nails as well as the inner part of the leopard spots, I used O.P.I. Extravagance, which is an absolutely stunning rich raspberry scattered holo from their Designer Series (and you can still get your hands on it at NailPolishCanada!) Finally, for the black detailing, I actually decided to use the Bundle Monster Straight Up Black Stamping Polish because I wanted really solid opacity and I think it worked beautifully.
To actually do the leopard spots, I used the end of my clean up brush to apply the dots in a sort of splotchy, uneven fashion. Then I went in with my essence Dotting Tool (widely available where essence is sold for those who don't want to order nail art tools online) to add little irregular dots around it and fill in the empty spaces.
The thing that I learned while doing this mani is that it's gonna look pretty ugly when you're in the process of it and you just have to hold on and have faith that it'll turn out in the end. Because you sort of scatter a few of the coloured spots around, it looks weird and splotchy and the instict can be to add more spots to fill in the empty spaces, but the ends up making the finished mani look really cluttered and messy. Less is definitely more and then you can go in and add black spots into the open spaces to give a more balanced look.
Even though this mani scared me a little bit to try out and the first few times I tried I was worried that I wasn't going to have a mani for this week's theme because I really don't like to share nail art that I'm not proud of, I'm really glad I tried it and I actually do think it's really beginner friendly - especially because you don't need any hard-to-get tools and it's really forgiving.
If you're interested in checking out more leopard nail art, be sure to head over and check out what Jayne and Renee have going on this week for their Mani Monday posts!
Thanks for reading!
0 comments