I'm sorry to admit that this is another one of those mani's that I know was inspired by another artist's mani, but I can't remember whose it was. If it was you - someone who had a naked nail and then added this sort of swooping black and white galaxy tip - then I thank you for the inspiration! It's been a long time since I've particularly liked French tips - probably since back in the day when I used to get really brutal acrylics done for special occasions like my high school graduation, and they air brushed on some French tips - but in the past couple of years I've really developed a liking for different types of non-traditional tips like this one. They're fun and there's the added benefit of the flowy design having a lot of wiggle room if you don't have the steadiest hand. 

I will admit that I would have really liked to have left my nails naked for this mani, but I have a few imperfections in my nail beds that I like to camouflage, so I decided to do this sort of jelly sandwich thing I've been doing recently. I started with one coat of a sheer white base, this one with a subtle shimmer to it, and then did one layer of a flakie topper, and then followed with one more coat of the sheer base. This technique ends up giving a really subtle look, but it's soft and so pretty when you see that peek of flakies coming through the base. 

I considered doing some kind of topper over the black tip, but ultimate I decided I wanted to keep the stamping super simple and high contrast with just the stars - which is exactly like the mysteriously unfindable mani that inspired this one. One of the appealing things about this design is that these types of stars are actually really easy to paint by hand, but I love stamping and the Maniology M152 Stamping Plate has the perfect images for this so I went that route. I just sort of randomly placed the stars and dots over the nail, trying not to crowd them or to leave it too sparse.

Once I was happy with my stamping, I sealed it in with a water based top coat and then finished with a generous layer of quick dry top coat for volume and shine. And voila!

I'll admit that as many times as people tell me that galaxy nail art is actually pretty easy, it still somewhat intimidates me to just do a straight up galaxy design (the Hogwarts one from the other day very much doesn't count), but this has perhaps opened me up a little bit more and maybe in the future I'll give a more traditional galaxy design a go. 

Anyway, thanks for reading!