I find that when I go deep into a theme, it can be hard to pull myself out of it and find my creativity again, which is a little bit of what happened after I went hard with Easter themed nails - I ended up in a bit of a creativity hole. But then I saw an Instagram video that supermuch inspired me, so I marinated on it a little bit and then came up with this design that isn't entirely what I was intending it to be, but I still think I really enjoy. Honestly... I'm a little on the fence still.

Keep reading for more!

I wasn't sure how far up I was going to take the smoosh when I started this (and honestly, my intention was to keep that part much more contained towards the tip of the nail that I ended up doing) so I decided to apply one coat of Picture Polish's Grace as my base. Grace is a really pretty pinky beige sort of shade with holo flakes in it that makes for a really pretty, sheer base and I suspect this is going to be popping up in a lot of nail art in the coming months.

When it came to choosing colours for the smoosh, I knew I wanted a sort of purple and green vibe and I generally wanted it to be fairly soft but with a little bit of contrast. I'm realizing as I type this that the process that happens in my brain is way more complicated and detailed that I ever think it is at the time. Anyway, I went with 5 shades for my smoosh, three in the pink/purple family along with a cool toned grey and a really soft sage green, all in a créme finish.

The way that I did the smoosh on this one was actually a little bit different than I generally do, which is that I applied one dot of each of the polishes in a sort of pile to a yogurt lid (one of the must have nail art tools, if we're being honest) and then pressed my stamper down into it and then without lifting the pressure gave it about a half turn and then lifted it. Without letting it dry down, I then applied it to the tip of my nails and very gently pounced a couple of times until I got the look that I wanted.

Admittedly, the stamping was a bit of an afterthought, but I think it actually might be my favorite part. I went with a really deep cranberry sort of stamping polish and this very grid-like dot pattern and decided to only use a portion of the image so that the dots were only on one corner of the nail. Once I was happy with my stamping, I sealed in the whole design with a water based top coat and then finished with a quick dry glossy top coat and voila!

Honestly, as I look at the finished product of this mani, what I'm left with is a really, really strong desire to do approximately 26,000 mani's using this combination of colours. Purple and green will forever ever be my favorite colour pairing of life. So there's that!

Anyway, thanks for reading!