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Wednesday, 27 March 2013

Tutorial: Jelly Watercolour Nails

Hello!

By popular demand over at Instagram, here is a rudimentary tutorial for the jelly watercolour nails I showed you last Saturday.

We begin with two coats of the base colour (I used Funny Bunny), followed by two generous coats of a thick quick-dry topcoat such as Seche Vite or Poshé. The topcoat is important, as it protects the base colour from bleeding during the watercolouring. The base colour doesn't need to be perfect (i.e. if you use a jelly like I did, don't worry too much about unevenness) because it will largely be covered up in the end. Wait until the topcoat is very dry, or else adding other polishes and/or acetone to it will cause it to behave strangely and perhaps go all sticky/mushy.




Gather all the jellies you want to use, plus a flat brush (I used my small one-stroke brush). The brush needs to have a good-sized flat surface but the shape of the tip doesn't matter.

This one stroke brush is stained from the love of projects past. And that sounds gross now that I've typed it.


Dab a few rounded spots of your first jelly colour onto your nail, then dip your brush in pure acetone and dab the side of the brush onto your jelly spots. This is important! Do not use the tip of the brush, you'll just dig into the jelly and cause bald spots. The key is to dab with the side of the bristles so that the acetone and the jelly polish mix and the resulting liquid can be 'dabbed around' the nail. This is hard to explain, but hopefully that gives you an idea!

I have my brush angled up here because I was trying to show the pale orange liquid that formed when the jelly polish and the acetone mixed. If you dab like this, you'll remove your entire spot from your nail, or else just maim it a lot!!


This is what I ended up with after dabbing around my orange spots:




Now I'll just show you before and after shots of each of the other colours of jellies. The process is the same for each.










Once you've gone through all of your jelly colours, wait until they are dry -- this shouldn't take very long, you won't have used much polish and the acetone will speed things up -- and then clean up your cuticles with an angled brush and acetone, topcoat your creation, and you're done!




Please let me know if you have any questions at all, I'll do my best to be helpful. :)

The list of the polishes I used is in my other post, right here.


J.

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