When I sat down to plan out my September nail art plans this year - not something I do every month, but something kind of necessary when staring down the gargantuan task of Halloween approaching - I knew that I absolutely needed to include this mani in this month's posts. Pretty much as soon as I saw the Pueen Animal Safari 01 Stamping Plate*, I was inspired to put this together and what ended up on my nails is pretty much bang on exactly what I pictured in my head, which is definitely not always the case. But I'm pretty in love with the final result and super excited to share it!

Keep reading for more!

Because I knew exactly how I wanted this mani to look, choosing the right colors to put it together was super important to me. From jump, I knew I wanted to use a very ashy brown color palette for the reverse stamping, I knew I needed a base that would work well with those colors without feeling too... samey. I actually spent a fair bit of time digging around in my collection before settling on this gorgeous sage green polish just absolutely packed with gold flakes. I feel like this was the perfect base choice because it has that ashiness in the green but brings some contrasting warmth with the gold that really, I think, does exactly what I wanted it to.

For the stamping, I knew that I wanted to use the full owl image on my ring fingers and then isolate the acorns and leaves at the top of the image for the rest of my nails. I love love love images that can be used this way because it's really sort of a no-brainer as far as creating a cohesive design and also allows for an  intricate design that doesn't end up feeling too busy. I used a dotting tool and a nail art brush to fill in this design - I feel like different shapes and sizes of fill benefit from having the two different tools to create a solid fill - and let them dry down on the stamper.

Once I was ready to transfer, I applied my second coat of base polish and let that dry down on the nails until it was tacky. Next, I just transferred the images directly onto that tacky base. For my ring finger, I did my best to center the image and make sure that both of the owls were fully visible. For the rest of my fingers, I just sort of randomly decided a corner to place the acorns image at and slapped it on there.

Once I was happy with the design, I sealed it in with a nail art top coat before finishing with a matte top coat to bring down the shine and make everything really smooth and seamless. And voila!

Honestly, I'm just so happy with how this mani turned out. I actually struggled a little bit with capturing it in photos because something about the saturation just ended up going a little funny, but I managed to make it work and I'm so thrilled because it would have been a shame not to share this one!

If you're interested in any of the Pueen products that I used to create this mani, they are all available on Amazon and they definitely have my stamp of approval. Also, head over to @pblnails to check out a video tutorial for this mani and follow me there to keep up on all of my nail art designs!

Thanks for reading!!