#ManiMonday 31/08/2020

Happy #manimonday everyone! It was back to the races this weekend which only means one thing, horse nails! So, let’s get into this week’s orange tribal horse design.

Products used:

Stamping plate: PICT You “PY-J015” and Clear Jelly Stamper “CJS LC-40 Horsin’ Around”
Stamping polish: Born Pretty “BP-AC04 Tulip Celebration“
Base: Sally Hansen “Double Duty Base & Top Coat” and Essie “Blanc”
Gold Strip: Revlon Colorstay Gel Envy “Jackpot 200”
Top coat: Hit The Bottle “Water Tight” Smear Free Topcoat

When I found out that I had a horse running, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do on my nails. However, this week was just one of those weeks where nothing went to plan!

This week’s design all started with the colours. My horse who raced on Saturday was Weaponson and his silk colours are yellow and orange. As I seem to be doing a lot of yellow nails recently, I decided that orange was going to be my main colour. This orange stamping polish is literally the same colour, so that was perfect but didn’t help when it came to coming up with another design after the first one failed. I thought two neon colours in orange and yellow would be a bit too much, so I swapped out the yellow for gold. The only reason the base is white is because my original design had a white feature and by the time I changed the design, it was too late to take it off.

The images this week caused me the most drama. Originally, I was going to do an orange rectangle that took up two-thirds of my nail with a gold stripe between the orange and white. However, it turns out that I don’t have a rectangle image like I thought I did. So, I thought I’d just stamp the white on instead but we didn’t have the right orange polish (and I don’t really like to use my stamping polish for the base) which meant it was back to the drawing board. Then I thought I’d do a variation but with the triangle images I do have. After a few goes they weren’t picking up at all (and it was just random patches not working so there was no rhyme or reason) so I decided to cut my loses as time was getting away from me now and start again. After flipping through my plates, I came across this tribal image. It was interesting, solid enough that orange would be the main colour and the pattern allowed me to still add that touch of gold. Then for my feature nail, I turned to my trusty horse image, which I reckon I’ve featured on over 10 designs now.

The pickup rate was surprisingly good this week (besides the second failed design). This tribal image came from the same plate as last week’s heart and chevron image, so I think I can conclude that the PICT You plates are very good despite only being like $2 on Aliexpress. Like the heart and chevron image, this image had fine lines, so you just have to watch they don’t blow back onto the nail. Obviously, I had some trouble with the solid shapes (which from another PICT You plate), but the pattern or novelty images from this company seem to pick up really well. This plate is quite deep, so I did most of the picking up this week which suggests that a light squish is required. As I was reserve stamping 8 nails this week, all of my stampers got a workout (3 round and 2 cubed) and they all picked up well. The horse was also pretty good, just missing the finer details (head and hooves) a few times. My support worker used the cubed stamper for them just because those stampers are easier to see through, especially when it comes to line up the two horse images.

Overall, this design wasn’t anything like a pictured, but I’m really happy with the result. It’s different to anything I’ve done before and I feel the tribal pattern goes really well with the horse. If you were recreating this design you wouldn’t have to do the reserve stamping gold strip, though I do feel it ties the nails together nicely.

Bye for now.