Hello Loves! Once again I have fallen behind on some of the nail art challenges, I committed myself to completing. This is for last week's Nail That Technique Challenge on Instagram: Scaled Gradient. If you are confident with your gradient abilities this will be an easy but time consuming nail art for you. If you are not great at gradients this nail art design gives you ample opportunity to practice. I'm okay with gradients but like almost anything I could use some practice. This is what I came up with...
I was concerned that this design wouldn't work well with my nails, because as you can see I recently brought them back down to nubtown. Too many of my nails were breaking and chipping and I could no longer stand the unevenness, so I'm back to shorties. However, the design still worked well. If you think your nails are too short for this design you could also do it vertically versus horizontally (which is how I did it).
Back to the technique and what I did. This is a layered sponge technique that requires some time to create. If you are in a hurry, don't bother with this technique. I started off with one coat of China Glaze 'Grass is Lime Greener' from the City Flourish collection. The purple stuff on my cuticles is Ellagee's 'Lickity Split Latex Mani Mask'. This was one of the goodies in my Indie Bunny Mani Box that I was lucky enough to get my hands on (reveal, swatches, and review coming this weekend...hopefully). If you don't have a latex mask please save yourself some time and either use Elmer's glue or tape. This will save a lot of clean up time.
I then used a make up sponge and did a gradient of China Glaze 'Towel Boy Toy' (an oldie but a goodie) and 'Grass is Lime Greener.'
I concentrated the gradient toward the tip (free end) of my nail. I layered the gradient until it reached an opacity that I was happy with. I then applied a quick drying top coat.
When the first layer of gradient was dry, I added single chevron vinyls from nailvinyls.com and covered the exposed area on the tips of my nails with scotch tape. You'll notice that I alternated the direction of the V-shape to keep things interesting.
Once, again I repeated the sponge gradient process on the exposed area of the nails. Keeping the gradient colors in the same order as previously sponge. For example, I used green near the tip and the blue near the cuticle with the first layer, and repeated that pattern with the next layer. If you reverse the colors between layer your creating a reciprocal gradient instead of a scaled gradient. I sponged until, I once again, reached my desired opacity and then I removed my vinyls, tape, and latex mask. You can see that I still have some clean up to do, but definitely not as much if I hadn't protected the skin around my nails.
At this point I performed my usual clean up with a brush and acetone. To make things a little more interesting I added a sprinkling of China Glaze 'Fairy Dust'. Lastly, I topped of with a super shiney top coat, Rica (aka Justricarda) 'Glossy Glam' another of my goodies from the Indie Bunny Mani Box.
The final result, in my opinion is awesome! There are so many different combinations of colors and shapes you can do to create this kind of gradient. I've seen it done with chevrons, straights, lightning bolts; I've seen it done horizontally and vertically. Really the possibilities are endless. If you need more inspiration, I highly recommend you checkout the YouTube Channel of the original creator of the scaled gradient Simply Nailogical (or at least I'm pretty sure she started this all). She has several different videos on this technique (I bet you wish I told you that at the beginning of this post, so you could have skipped reading this altogether, but I was diabolically clever, hehehe!).
Even though this was a very time consuming technique, I am glad I tried it out. I hope you enjoyed this nail art design, thanks for stopping by, see you next time.
Your Fellow Plebe,
