#ManiMonday 04/05/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! Isolation still isn’t providing any inspiration for my nails but luckily the autumn season is. So, let’s get into this week’s autumn leaf design!

Products used:

Stamping plate: Harunouta “L071”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-ET06 Twilight” and “BP-AC04 Tulip Celebration”
Base: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat” and Essie “Blanc”
Top coat: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat”

This design was largely influenced by the leaves changing colour here in Australia. I also haven’t had the chance to try out this plate yet, which was perfect for this design.

Let me just start by saying that the stamping gods were definitely not on my side this week! I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do, which normally removes that playing around time but not this week. What ended up on my nails was slightly different from my original plan.

Normally I rarely have any issues with colours, but this week I did! I started with the usual autumn colours of yellow, red, orange and bronze, but as you can see only the last two colours were used in the end. I opted for a white base to make these colours pop too.

I was also originally going to do a black tree, but it was too stark against the orange leaves and definitely had a more wintery feel. This resulted in the bronze tree which has a softer and probably more tree-like look. The red and yellow leaves also got scrapped because we felt you might lose the tree behind too many layers of leaves. They were also a touch too bright for autumn leaves, especially the yellow. As the single leaves only needed two colours and because the orange and bronze toned nicely together, we went with those colours.

In terms of the pickup rate, I would say it was ok this week. The tree picked up well and we hardly had any trouble with the single leaves.

We did play around with lots of different leaves to put on my non-feature nail, but these didn’t pick up very well at all, hence we opted for the single leaf. The main trouble was that those grouped leaves were very small and it’s a surprisingly deep plate, which made it very hard to clean as well. The spacing of the leaves within the images also made it hard as some were either too spaced out that hardly anything would make it onto my nail or the ones that were close together wouldn’t pick up. This leaf dilemma was another reason why we just went with the orange leaves.  

Overall, this design did grow on me over the week, with the biggest issue at the start is it just wasn’t what I pictured. I think the orange and bronze match together really nicely and it definitely has an autumn feel. I would perhaps go with a slightly dark base colour (soft grey maybe) if I was to do this design again.

Bye for now!