Take Me to the Beach! - Ocean and Palm Trees at Sunset Nail Art

I have a double dose of awesome nail art for you guys today! I've been seeing a lot of these ocean/beachy/sunset nails lately and I finally got around to trying them. Took me the better part of a day but I'm super happy with the result. I totally hand painted those palm trees!! (which is very exciting for me because I was getting a bit frustrated with my lack of skill in that area, tbh) Practice makes perfect though and after trying it a few times on some practice nails, I got it down. On with the tutorial!

First up are my ocean waves on the beach. Basically, you are going to start with a white polish base - completely dry. Then sponge a blue/white gradient onto the nail, I used acrylic paint for this because I don't have an awesomely pretty blue polish in this color (I am in desperate need, let me tell you!!). Next comes the tricky part...you're going to start out as if you are doing a watermarble, a small cup or bowl and room temperature water, add a few drops of white polish to the water so you have a nice spread, then spray with hairspray, or rubbing alcohol, or perfume (or any number of things, honestly...just look around your house and try anything you have). It should make the polish separate into a spotty web looking thing. The thing about this is that you have to wash out your up after every dip...at least I did because there is really no way to clean the water (so that you can get a good spread with your polish for the other nails) so you have to dump it and start again. Also mind where you are spraying...I cleared off my big counter in the kitchen for this and then wiped it all down afterwards...it does get a little messy. Anywho...when that was all said and done, I took some gold glitter polish and sponged a bit onto the tips of my nails for the sand. I used white paint for the seashell (which came out way bigger than I intended) and some watered down gold polish for the stripes on the shell. It certainly was time consuming but I got a lot of compliments on it, so it was worth it in the end. 

On to the real winner here though...the sunset nails! I just loooove the colors, even though I'm not much of an orange person usually. These are fairly straight forward, I just started with my white base, as usual, and sponged on a purple/pink/orange gradient. I did use a matte top coat after that to help the paint stick better and to protect the gradient in case I messed up the trees. I used very watered down black acrylic paint and a very thing striping brush (which is from a set of nail art brushes but I actually cut it down more because it wasn't thin enough). The brush needs to be very thin and the so does the paint or you won't be able to get the really thin lines you need for the detail work...it took me forever to figure that out because nobody really seems to mention it very often. Learn from my failures people! lol 

As always, I love hearing from you guys...any questions or comments, just drop me a line =)