NAIL ART: Teal Drybrush Crackle Nails

by - September 09, 2020


Hey guys! I'm taking a little Staycation this week, tucking into the messy bun, no bra, cozy life for a few days and I'm loving it. It's also meant that I've been able to spend a little extra time at my nail desk putting together some upcoming mani's as I get ready for my favorite time of year - Halloween nails! Anyway, sometimes when I sit down to do my nails, I don't really have any idea what I'm doing and I just wait for inspiration to hit as I'm doing it, and that's definitely what happened with today's nail art. 

Keep reading for more!


I knew that I wanted to do this sort of horizontal dry brush technique for my base and I knew I wanted to do a sort of smoky teal colour, so I grabbed for three polished that I thought would blend well together - a really pale grey with shimmer, a smokier soft blue with shimmer, and then this deep teal with a sort of crelly texture that I knew would add depth without taking over the rest of the shades. It's important when you're going to be blending shades that you consider the depth and pigmentation, because if the darker shades are super opaque you can easily use too much and lose the dimension.

To create the decals I apply swipes of the polish to my nail art mat, starting with the lightest shade, and I just use the polish brush to blend the shades. (Make sure you clean off the brush before you put it back in the bottle so that you don't mix the colours when you're doing this.) This is hard to describe, so if you want to see it in action, head over to @pblnails to see the video tutorial. Once I've gotten the blend that I'm looking for, I leave the decal on the mat until it's dry enough to peel up smoothly - but don't wait too long because you still want it to be flexible to get a smooth transfer onto the nail.

I like to use a sticky base coat over a thin coat of the lightest polish I used in my decal when I apply. You can use a stamper to transfer, which I tend to find really easy but can sometimes not give the smoothest application, or like I did with this mani, you can just lay it on the nail and smooth it with your fingers to start and then a silicone tool to really get it evenly adhered.


Once the decal was all trimmed using a metal cuticle tool and crisped up using a clean up brush dipped in acetone, I decided to go in with stamping (as I do.) For the stamping, I actually used two different stamping plates with sort of similar crackley images. I wanted to layer my stamping to get a sort of grungey and really dimensional image. I started with white using an image that was a little bit more delicate and sparse before going in with black stamping polish and an image with thicker, more defined lines.

Once I was happy with the stamping, I first applied a coat of water based top coat to seal in the stamping and then followed with a glossy top coat for shine and protection. And voila!


All Products Used
essie - Go With The Flowy
Love & Beauty - Periwinkle
OPI - My Favorite Gal Pal*
Born Pretty Store Stamping Polish - Pure
WhatsUpNails Stamping Polish - Neither Noir
Suncoat Water Based Top Coat
QUO Flash Dry Top Coat
Nicole Diary L18 Stamping Plate
WhatsUpNails B010 Stamping Plate
WhatsUpNails Magnified Clear Stamper


I really like the drybrush technique as a base because there's a lot of customization that you can do depending on the colours that you choose and I really like what came out with these combination of shades. If you're like me, doing these kinds of decals might seem a little bit intimidating at first, but I actually think it's pretty easy once you get the hang of it and there's so much you can do once you're comfortable with it.

Like I said, I find my description of how I did this look to be a little bit awkward, so if you'e interested in seeing video, be sure to head over to @pblnails on Instagram - and follow me there for all of my nail art videos!

Thanks for reading!


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