ncu – watercolor

i’m getting back into painting my nails. i don’t know what it is, but i have just been uninspired the past few weeks. i have been very busy and i did go on vacation, but i’ve just been dreading the thought of having to paint my nails. i that’s part of the problem, that i feel i have to do it. but i also think i’m just uninspired by a lot of the prompts this year. when i read through the list i just wasn’t that excited about any of them… but i’m going to challenge myself to find a way to make them exciting. either by trying new stuff or being weird or whatever. we’ll see if that works ;)

this week’s prompt was watercolor nails. i have seen this technique done quite a few times and it’s always pretty nice, but i’ve never tried it myself. it’s not hard, but it definitely took me a bit to get the hang of it.

if you don’t know, to do this style, all you do is put a drop of paint on your nail then use nail polish remover / acetone on a brush to thin in out and spread it around. here’s a good video to see what i mean. i found that the more liquid you use the better it works. i was worried that the acetone would just take all the color off and i would be left with nothing on my nail so i didn’t use much at first. but the dryer my brush was, the more i was just daubing the paint around rather than it spreading out on it’s own like watercolor.

notice the purple in the above photo – that was the first color i did. i feel like you can see that i sort of just pushed the color around (look at the middle finger and thumb especially). you’ll also notice how bright and vivid the colors are. that does not say watercolor (to me at least). i used bright colors thinking that a lot of the color was going to disappear once i added the acetone. well, yes and no. the purple we’ve already mentioned, but even the pink and yellow, as i started to get the way of it, still didn’t lighten up that much. i don’t know if i still wasn’t doing it right or if it’s the colors of the polish i used are too bright or too pigmented. but don’t worry – i had a solution!

i just painted over them with a fairly transparent sparkly white. and voilà! watercolor colors ;)

colors used: models own pukka purple, pink punch, luis lemon, sinful colors social ladder.