rainbow nail art | Craftynail

This is my St.Patty’s design for the N.A.I.L. Linkup! I loved brainstorming about which green polishes to incorporate into this design to make it look Irish. I freakin love green nail polish. Here’s what I’m wearing: The dark green is Zoya Ivanka. I’ve only worn it once before so I was happy to try it out again. What a gorgeous foil green!

The light green is a new AVON quick dry polish that I ordered from my avon lady called Don’t Be Jaded. It was in the outlet catalog for $1.99! Like seriously! My mom picked up a bottle too and she texted me a cute nail pic this AM (it was her jade green nails with a sudoku game as her backgrdrop) LOL. Her text said that she painted her nails with Don’t be Jaded on thursday. Today is sunday and it’s still holding up. Yes, this is why we love AVON. And green is my mom’s fave nail polish color too so we be happy!

Do you like my giant gold glitters on my thumb and pinky? They kinda remind me of gold coins at the end of the rainbow. It’s OPI’s When Monkeys Fly! which I dabbed on and also had to pick and place some of the glitters too. I also did a rainbow dotted nail using a dotting tool and a bunch of random polishes. Then I placed some gold studs on my Zoya fingers, added some seche vite, and now I have a fun mix mani for St. Patrick’s Day! It was relatively quick and easy.

I’d love to see your St Patrick’s mani too. Here are the inlinkz so you can enter a N.A.I.L. pic for March-

St Patrick’s Day

Today’s nails were inspired by my inner child! When I was a little girl (back in the 80’s) I just loved rainbows! Rainbow stickers, rainbow spiral notebooks, rainbow earrings… pretty much anything that had a rainbow on it caught my attention. Too bad it took me 30+ years to discover this rainbow gradient technique! Well, this mani is dedicated to you, little Jacqui from the 80’s! I know you would’ve loved these nails. 🙂

My first attempts at gradients were total fails- until I came up with this very effective way of using makeup sponges. Here’s a pic of how I use my sponge for a gradient:

I start out with a standard cosmetic application wedge and use sharp scissors to cut it into 4 or 5 long skinny pieces. I take one of the pieces, fold it in half, and dab it into a drop of nail polish on my work surface. Then I sponge it onto my nail to create the gradient effect. I think these folded over sponge strips work well since their surface is slightly curved, yet small-so you can dab, dab, dab away to get the paint just where you want it. I use a different sliver of sponge for each color. The small surface area of the sponge worked great to get the skinny lines of color for today’s rainbow gradient… but it also works well for a larger-scale gradient (like this leopard design where I only sponged on one color). I think this technique is less messy and it’s fool-proof!! I haven’t screwed up one gradient yet since I started doing it this way !