#ManiMonday 18/05/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! Guess what? This week I actually had some inspiration for what design to do! If you hadn’t guessed from the images and colours, I had a horse race! So, let’s get into this week’s horse and hearts design.

Products used:

Stamping plate: Clear Jelly Stamper “CJS LC-40 Horsin’ Around” and Born Pretty “BP-L013”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-WN05 Dark Armor”, “BP-WN03 Throne” and “BP-AC03 Bright Yellow Sprouts”
Base: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat”, Essie “Fifth Avenue” and CoverGirl XL Nail Gel “Haughty Lemon 740”
Top coat: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat”

If you’ve been following my blog for awhile now, you’ll know that when I have a horse racing, I usually turn to this Clear Jelly Stamping plate. Horse images are actually quite hard to come by, so I was very excited when I found a plate full of them! Unfortunately, some of the images are too big for my nails, hence why I use the horse seen on my feature nail a lot. I also really like the quotes on the plate as well.

In terms of colours this week it was pretty straight forward. The jockey of this horse wears yellow and red, so I always like to feature at least one of those colours. This week it was both! I was originally going to do a red base with yellow hearts as I was going to do a yellow horse. Unfortunately, the yellow stamping polish didn’t show up on the red, hence we did the reverse (plus Mum said hearts are normally red anyway). Side note though, I saw a trick online this week where you do a white stamp first (because white shows up on everything) and then once you have this neutral base you stamp the other colour onto the white. This helps it to show up better and it’s definitely a trick I’ll be trying in the future.

To make things a little more interesting though, we opted for a red feature nail. This also tied in nicely with the hearts. Then to tie the horse in with my other nails, we did a black horse with a gold outline. This stamping gold is definitely more of a yellow gold which made it perfect, plus the metallic colours always show up nicely on black.

With the pick up rate, it was pretty good this week but not perfect. The plate the hearts came from was deeply etched, yet only required a light touch to pick up. It was usually just one or two hearts that didn’t pick up well, but unfortunately, they were in the middle of the image, so you couldn’t really work around it. The horse outline can also be temperamental sometimes but if you do a roll pick up, rolling parallel to the line on its back then it should be fine.

Interestingly this week, the top coat smudged my design, but only on a few nails. For those that don’t know, I paint the top coat onto my stamper and then stamp that onto my nails. This technique is normally faultless, compared to the floating technique (where you paint the top coat on but don’t touch the nail), but for some reason, it wasn’t working this week. I don’t know why because I’ve stamped in this red before and it’s never smudged, the black didn’t smudge (even when the stamper slipped on one of them) and they were definitely dry. Mum thinks it’s because that stamping head is disintegrating, so it might be time to finally retire it (3 and a bit years is pretty good!).

Overall, I really love this design. Yellow and red is a hard combination to pull off sometimes but this look does it. I think the heart nails even have this cartoon/comic book look and if you put a white dot on the top of each heart that would be especially true (maybe I’ll try a comic book look when my dotting tools arrive). It’s also different from my other horse designs, which is hard to achieve with limited images and colours.

Bye for now!