Summer Sunset Manicure
Hey Beauties! As you all know, I am currently out of town on vacation, and I am enjoying every second of it! The lovely and amazing Jaurne from Oh Dreams is taking over around here today and she has an adorable summertime manicure to share with all of you! Take it away, Jaurne!
Hello everyone! I’m Jaurne from OhDreams.Tk. As a reader and follower of Cupcakes and Curves, I was more than delighted when the idea of making a guest post, while Miss Brandi enjoys some well-deserved holidays, came up.
Since we’re in summer, and given that I’m a total mani freak, I thought I’d bring to you a very colorful, fun and summery ombre manicure tutorial. This is the manicure that we’re going to create:
The tools and colors you will need are:
- Base and top coat of your choice- Highly recommend using these to protect your natural nail, and to make the manicure last longer.
- Colors- Pink (i.e. Rimmel “Posh pink”, O.P.I. “Japanese rose garden”, Essie “Pink-a-boo”), Yellow (i.e. Essie “Love it’s like sunshine”, Zoya “creamy”, Nars “Amchoor”), Orange (i.e. Essie “Digging orange”, Orly “Orange”, China Glaze “Code orange”), Black (i.e. Chanel “Black satin”, O.P.I. “My private jet”) and White (i.e. NYX “Matte white”, Essie “Blank”).
- Small size dotting tool- If you don’t have dotting tools, you can use a toothpick, a nail art brush, or even a hairpin.
First we’ll take care of our nails, this includes cuticles (I prefer to cut mine), file and moisturize.
After letting our base coat dry, we’re going to paint our nails with our white color, and wait for them to completely dry.
Now here comes the fun part. To achieve the ombre effect, we will apply all our three nail colors to the make-up sponge as shown in the picture below, and dab the sponge onto our nail once or twice. Be very careful with this step, because if you dab the sponge more than you should, it’ll start to get sticky and your white polish will come off onto the sponge. With the sponging technique, it’s easier and better to do several coats to get your nails completely opaque, rather than trying to get them opaque in one stroke, because it won’t happen and you’ll take the base color off basically haha. Also, a good tip to save time is to cover your skin around your nails with scotch or cello tape (as you do in the water marble technique). I don’t normally do it because I can get it clean pretty fast, but if you’re not used to sponging, this tip will come in very handy.
Make sure to let the polish dry in between coats to avoid the stickiness I mentioned above. If you do all your rails in a row, it’ll be enough time to continue with the second coat. Make sure to load up the sponge in between applications.
Here you can see the difference between just one coat of sponging, and the final opaque color I was satisfied with (3 coats):
Now for our accent nail we’re going to draw a palm tree, which I think matches perfectly with our summer sunset theme. Grab the tool of your choice (dotting tool, toothpick, etc) and, if you haven’t done something similar before, I recommend practicing on a piece of paper first. Draw a slightly curved vertical line, paint a dot at the top, and from that dot pull what will be the palm tree branches. Again, it may look a bit bumpy right now, but it’ll all be smooth once we apply our top coat.
Tip: Draw thin lines. It’ll be easier to make them thicker if you want. If you draw a thick line and mess up, you’ll have to take the whole nail design off and start again to fix it.
Almost done! I’ve added small bird shape details in my thumb nail as well. You do this by painting curved “V” shapes, doing it in different sizes gives the illusion of birds at different distances.
Here you can see how the top coat smooths and evens the nail design in my index and middle fingers, compared to the ring finger, where I hadn’t applied top coat yet:
Clean around the edges with some q-tips dipped in acetone, apply top coat, and you’re done!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial. If you want to see more of my tutorials you can find me at OhDreams.Tk. I’d also like to thank the awesome Brandi for letting me share this with you guys, and let’s hope she’s having fun in her vacays.
Have a lovely summer, everyone!Jaurne xx
