Colorful Trees with Birds

This was such a fun manicure and probably my favorite of the summer! I got the idea for this manicure here. Check it out! Lots of pictures here so don't forget to click the read more button!

I made a few changes to the look as compared to the link above. Instead of a gradient across all ten nails, I did the gradient the same across each hand.

The polishes used in this manicure from pinky finger to thumb are: Sinful Colors: Purple Diamond (light purple), Essie: Sexy Divide (dark purple), NYC: Cashmere Creme (light blue), Sinful Colors: Love Nails (medium blue), Zoya: Holly (dark green), Sally Hansen: Ivy League (light green), Sally Hansen: Golden-I, Zoya: Penny (bronze-y orange), NYC: Burgundy Broadway Creme (red), and Sally Hansen: Posh Plum. For the birds and branches, I used Sinful Colors: Rich in Heart (dark brown).

And here's the other hand!

The tree leaves were stamped with a makeup sponge and the birds and branches drawn with a toothpick. Very. Very. Carefully.

Lotsa struggle with the lighting today. 

In hindsight, I wish I had used the decal method to make the "love birds" on my right hand ring finger. For some reason the left hand (which should be easier since I'm right-handed) was surprisingly difficult. Go figure. 

FYI: the decal method (is how I'm going to refer to it) is like making a sticker out of your nail polish. Take a plastic bag, like a ziploc, lay it down on a flat surface. Paint with your nail polish on top. Leave it to dry overnight. Peel it off in the morning and you can stick it straight on your nail (without adding any glue or clear polish or anything! It just sticks by itself). For best results, start with a wide base of clear polish and mark where the polish ends with a brightly colored polish. You can also trim these decals to fit your nail! So useful. More on this next time! 

And this last picture, though it's a bit blurry, shows tip wear after approximately eight full days of wear. Now, this is not normal tip wear, because for five of those days, I was a staff member at my high school's band camp...and so you can assume that my nails experienced some degree of torture more than normal tip wear. Anyway, it held up excellently; the only noticeable tip wear was on my thumb and index finger, and I even wore this manicure for a few days after I took this last picture. 

Anyway, thanks for reading! Next time...any Nintendo fans out there?