I know I sound like a broken record, but the current trends of abstract nail art are just full of endless opportunities for creativity in countless different styles - and clearly, I want to splash around and play in all of them. For today's mani, I honestly went into it entirely unsure as to whether it was going to work on my nails the way I imagined it in my head. Honestly, a lot of the time it can really go either way - especially when what I'm imagining is inspired by nail art designs done in gel polish, which definitely behaves and performs in a completely different way to traditional polish. 

Anyway, without further ado, let's get into the nail art.

I went into this mani knowing that I wanted a really soft, muted color palette on a sheer base, but I didn't really have a plan. It wasn't until I sat down and grabbed a couple of polishes from OPI for my reverse stamping that I decided what I was going to do. My bottle of OPI's Robots Are Forever is getting pretty empty and thick at this point, so I know I need to use it while I can instead of hoarding it and now seemed like the perfect time. I decided to pair it with three more OPI polishes in really soft, muted shades that I would describe as a barely pink pale beige créme, a pastel mint green créme, and a pale silvery pink shimmer. Those three polishes paired with that soft milky base and then really high contrast black stamping polish felt like exactly what I was looking for.

To start, I applied one coat of Robots Are Forever to all of my nails and let it dry while I worked on my reverse stamping.

Essentially the idea that I had with this mani was to mimic similar hand painted designs that I've seen from professional nail techs using gel polish. I wanted to recreate this type of look using regular polish and stamping and I felt like the best way to do that was with some very specific reverse stamping. First, I picked up the image that I wanted to use and then used a fine nail art brush to apply lines of the three very light colored polishes I chose to this mani along the lines of the stamping image. I did my best to drag the brush at the end so that I got a smooth brush stroke at the edge of the image, which allowed me to have a little bit more freedom in how and where I applied the image to the nail. Once the image was dry to the touch on the stamper head, I applied a thin layer of sticky base coat, let it dry down until it was tacky (about a minute or so) and then transferred the image directly from the stamping plate. For my outer nails, I also went in with just straight stamping to fill out the nail a little bit more at the edges.

Once I was happy with the design, I sealed it in with a nail art top coat and then followed with a matte top coat to bring down the shine and give a flat finish. And voila!

I have to admit that initially I wasn't quite sure that I was in love with this mani, but the more I look at it the more I love how it turned out. Like I said above (and have probably said in a handful of other abstract nail art posts recently) I'm just in love with all of the different abstract design possibilities and I love playing with different techniques to create them, especially the ones that are adapted from gel nail art.

If you're not already following me over at @pblnails on Instagram, be sure to head over there to check out a video tutorial for this design and to keep up with all of my nail art!

Thanks for reading!