Hello everyone! This summer has gone way too fast, it seems like it just was Memorial Day and now Labor Day has come and gone. Technically according to the calendar, it is summer until September 22. So to try can keep summer alive for a little longer we will be creating another tropical nail design. Back in April I purchased the Orly Melting Point collection and I wanted to create a tropical design using some of the polishes from that collection, and I finally got to create one. This collection did give me some troubles creating a gradient, I think due the polishes having a more of a sheer finish to them.
Here are the polishes and nail art tools used to create this tropical nail design:
Base and top coat- CND Stickey Base Coat and CND Super Shiney Top Coat.
Polishes- Orly- Glass Act, Orly- Having a Smeltdown, Orly- The Floor is Lava, Orly- Erupt To No Good, Orly- Cesium The Day, Sally Hansen- Hard as Nails- Hard to get, and Zoya- Oceane.
Nail art brushes- Thin stripper and detail brushes, and a fan brush.
Acrylic paint- Green, yellow, and brown.
Other- Makeup sponge and liquid latex.
Apply a top coat to clean dry nails.
Let that dry.
Polishes-
Thumb- a blueish purple (Orly- Glass Act)
Index and pinky- a blueish green (Orly- Having a Smeltdown)
Middle and ring finger- white (this is your base color for the gradient, the white helps the colors to show up better.)
Sunset gradient on the middle and ring finger nails:
First we will start off with the sunset gradient. Just to start off, this gradient did take a little bit of trial and error, at first when I practice this design I started with a sponge and it seems to not work that well. So then I looked up a YouTube video to see if anyone had tried to make a gradient using the Orly Melting Point collection and someone had done one using a fan brush, I tried that and it seem to work, then when I did this final design on my nails, I tried the fan brush method and it seem like it was drying to fast.
Anyways I will go over the weird way that I got this gradient to work.
First if you have liquid latex you can apply that over your fingers that you are going to do the gradient over.
First take your fan brush and polish three colors that you would like to use, I used a Pink The Floor Is Lava, Orange Erupt to No Good, and Yellow Cesium The Day, then polish your fan brush with each color overlapping the colors a little.
Then take your fan brush and wipe the brush from side to side on the nail. I did this a few time and it seem like it was drying to fast and not distribute the polish on the nail enough.
Then I tried the sponge method and that see to help the gradient to be opaque enough.
If you applied liquid latex, you can peel it off first.
Once your gradient is done apply a top coat to help to blend the gradient together.
For the ocean water we will keep things very simple, just take a makeup sponge with a shimmer blue on it (Zoya Oceane) and dab that on the tip of the nails for your ocean water, it is ok if it looks a little messy.
Palm Trees:
For the Palm trees first I mixed green and yellow to make a lighter green (that way I have 2 greens). Make one palm tree on each side of the nail on the right side on the ring finger nail and the left side for the middle finger nail. I went for a true to color palm tree verses a shadow.
Once you are happy with how your nails look, apply a top coat again to all of your nails to help your nails last through the rest of the summer days and to help them shine in the sun.
Here is the practice version, I did like this design but I was not my favorite I just think the Orly Melting Point collection was hard to gradient, due to the polishes being on the sheer side. I did still feel like this was worth doing a post on anyways.
Hope you enjoyed this summer tropical nail design!
See you next time for more nail fun!