Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride- Tropical Design

Aloha everyone! Once again I have a tropical themed nail design for all of you. I have really been in a tropical mood lately. Back in 2004 I went to Hawaii with my mom and brother, and I just fell in love with the place! Everything about Hawaii is just so beautiful and amazing. Along with how beautiful Hawaii, is the people that live there are also very nice and welcoming, and they treat everyone like you are part of their family (family is a big part of the Hawaiian culture.)  
One day very soon I hope to visit Hawaii again (I want to go back very badly), hopefully one day I will be able to visit all of the islands to see what beautiful scenery each island has to offer. Unfortunately right now there has been a few tropical storms that has hit Hawaii, I have not heard recently if there has been any damage or if anyone has gotten hurt (hopefully not.) Hopefully everyone and their families are safe. I would hate to see such a beautiful place be destroyed by a storm.

      Thought I would share this digital painting that I created in Photoshop 

a few months ago of a tropical sunset.  

Here are the nail polishes and tools I used for this tutorial:

 Nail polishes: Revlon Extra Life No Chip top coat, Color Club nail art in Black,

Sally Hansen- xtreme wear- White on, an orange polish, NYC- Midtown Mimosa, Revlon- Scented parfume- Not so Blueberry, and NYC- Water street blue

Nail tools: Just a makeup sponge (very few nail tools for this tutorial.) 
Also a precision tip Q-tip for cleaning up the side of your fingers.

The skill level for this tropical design is: 

 Intermediate

       
I decided to give this design a intermediate rating because I think this design has both somewhat hard parts to it and easy parts. For the more difficult parts, I ran into some trouble trying to get the gradients on the sponge to blend together. The easy part was creating the palm trees.   

1. Start off by painting all of you nails white, this will help all of your bright colors to pop!

2. Next take your makeup sponge and paint on 4 strips of color, and make sure to put a lot of polish on the sponge. Due to you painting on a sponge it will adsorb a lot of the nail polish. I first painted on purple, then yellow and orange for the sky, and the blue was supposed to be the water. 

 

The sponging technique I end up using was a little different than I have normally seen it done. I ended up cutting the sponge into 4 small pieces and individually sponging on the colors. This seem to work out better for me when I was trying to blend the colors together. But you can try which ever technique out and see which works better for you. 

 3. Now take your sponge and dab on the blue polish half way up on the bottom part of the nail (I will be showing the 2nd sponge technique that worked out for me.)

4. Next take your small sponge and paint that purple, then dab the purple half way up on the nail. Try to over lap the colors to start to create the gradient.

5. Now take another piece of sponge that you cut into a small piece and paint that yellow, again dab the yellow half way up the nail. Once again try to over lap the colors. Also, for some reason the yellow and orange I used started to make the white polish under those two colors come off and look a little weird, but the blue and purple worked out just fine.  

6. After you sponge on the yellow, finish off the gradient by sponging on orange. (Repeat the same steps as 3-5, they are all the same steps.)  Also if needed you can repaint you sponge with more polish and dab more polish to make the colors more opaque.

7. Now that you have finished your gradient sky (the blue was suppose to be the water, but I went up to high, so I decided the whole gradient would be the sky.) You may have noticed doing the gradient sponging is very messy. This can easily be fixed by taking a precision tip Q-tip dipped in nail polish remover, and removing the extra polish from the sides of your fingers.

8. Next, we will start to create the palm tree on a small island or hill. Take your black nail art polish and draw a small curve on the side of your nail and fill that in (Just like the photo above.)

9. Now we will create the trunk of the tree which is just a curved line. Once again, take your black nail art polish and draw a curved line.

10. The final step we will be creating are the leaves for the palm tree. Take your black nail art polish and draw 2 curved lines (they should look like arrows). Repeat this step 2 more times, then when you get to the top your leaves should look like a V. 

This is what your final palm trees should look like. Once your design has dried finish off this tropical look with a top coat.

Here is another photo of the tropical design. (For both of these photos I rotated the image that way all of you can see the way that it should be viewed.)

 Another extra photo of me holding a sea shell, thought it went well with the tropical theme.

  

Here is an extra design idea that all of you could try as some other options. Before I did my final design I felt that I needed to practice first. At first this was the design that I was going to do, but then I then decided to paint all of my nails with the sunset and palm trees, which ended up being the design I liked the best. (The 2 nails with just a black palm tree and leaf was just me practicing painting with my left hand.)

Hope everyone enjoyed this bright and colorful tropical design. Also, if anyone wanted to know why I titled this post Hawaiian roller coaster ride, that was a song that is in the Disney movie Lilo and Stitch (as you all know if you look at my Lilo post, I love that movie!) and when I created this design that title came to mind. 

Aloha and see you next time for my next nail design tutorial!