Lava lamp nails tutorial

 Today's tutorial is slightly more experimental than usual. This is a nail look I was going to try on myself but I personally think this would look way better on longer, more slender nails. Now that I'm officially someone with short nails, I don't think the results would satisfy my mental image prior to my nails having grown already. So that's why we're doing it on my trusty swatch sticks!

This nail look could be considered more complex and probably a mixture of different techniques, so let's go step by step. It's really simple and require barely any tool to work! The true magic comes in the polish selection:

The polishes you will need for the best effect are a jelly, a neon and a metallic. You can go for whichever color combo you find more appealing, but I'd recommend for your jelly to be on the transparent side, not one of those milky shades due to the way we're gonna recreate the look. Mine are as follows:

• Dilution of Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) XOX Nº11
• Deliplus Neón Nº218
• Wild & Young Metal collection Nº300

And I've used a dotting tool. You can also add a detailer brush if you feel more comfortable with that implement.

How did I create that jelly polish? I personally used dollar store top coat, as it's basically not quick dry at all. You can use clear nail polish if you so desire, but this was the cheapest option available to me and it honestly worked great. The proportion is deceiving: That barely has drops of the green on almost a full bottle of clear. You will want to experiment on your own.

Let's begin the actual tutorial, we want a layer of the jelly. By definition, it will be sheer. My swatch sticks are clear, your nail has a colour and a nail line and that will alter the look:

Now, what we want to do is to use our neon shade and the dotting tool to paint some irregular dots. I'd recommend making it sparse. Don't worry too much about making them perfect, you want them to not be!

 

You can do the same steps another time: add another layer of the jelly and then more dots of the neon. You don't really need to focus too much on the cuticle area or the tip of the nail, just make sure your shapes are not identical and that you can overlap some just a tiny bit!

 

I will tell you that this technique is basically a clone of what it's known in the community as jelly sandwich, but instead of using a topper or glitter, I did dots! If you want an actual jelly sandwich tutorial, please do let me know, it's a very simple technique that will elevate your nail art game and requires literally no talent. You can do an optional step here that I will disclose later on, but let's go back to the tutorial now:

 

With my metallic, I painted a thin french tip and also a similar shape in the cuticle area, to emulate the solid, opaque parts of the lava lamp. Use the tools you need to make the best lines you can, and don't hesitate to give your metallic a second layer if you feel like the opacity is not enough to satisfy you. This would be your finished look after a top coat!

So, let's analyze this look under different lights! I have a black light flashlight and this is what happens!

You can see that the green parts of the nail are glowing, and it's because of the neon polish. That's why you want it to be a neon, in particular. If you're not interested in this gimmick, you do not need it, but the brightness adds a lot to the final look even in regular light. And also, my jelly comes from a very particular polish that's not neon, but also reacts to black light similarly. This is a very old experiment that I did before even getting this black light flashlight! But I can tell you that they can be quite inexpensive online, if you're interested on getting one, too.

 

This picture was taken in darkness with only the black light, and it potentially threw off any kind of colour balance of my camera, as it looks quite blue toned in general, but you can still see the green cast of the polishes. In real life it looked a bit different, more akin to the previous picture, honestly.

And here, a little easter egg and my little lie: Remember when I said that you could do an optional step before painting with the metallic? I did add a glow in the dark topper, specifically Holo Taco's Glow in the dark taco, which also glows green because in this blog, what else? And this is what I could capture in that dark room after turning off the black light:

The quality is not the best, I gotta admit, but think that this camera doesn't know what to do without light. The metallic, for the most part, hides the glow, aside from on the borders, but that can be explained by the transparency of the jelly and the swatch stick, so the light you see is escaping from below the metallic, reflecting on the white surface below! As it's on all the nail, you lose the separation between jelly and neon, because what's glowing is the topper, and none of those two polishes react in darkness whatsoever.

In any case, I hope my ramblings about layering polishes and its effects have been entertaining and informative! I might do some sort of blog post explaining in part what can you expect to do with a polish depending on its base characteristics, like, expecting certain finishes not to gradient well and so. I would need to experiment a lot for that but I would be up to it if there's demand!

Thanks for reading this kind of nail design that I have been craving on my nails and haven't been able to make, I'm giving you the means to beat me to it, take them and tag me on it if you do! I'd love to see your recreations!

Fakemon Friday: Anype, the elemental pokémon

Today I will present you probably the longest post on this blog, and it's just because of the images it will have. I've been working on fakemon, if you couldn't tell, and today I'm going to present you one, yes, one, but it has... 22 forms. Well, technically 21, but I made another one as a base.

My concept here was a fakemon that could be each and every type and, if you've read my Fakemon types, I can't keep things simple post, I have 21 of them now. How do I explain it? I made a sponge fakemon and each palette corresponds with a type. I felt like sponges could be colourful and simple enough evolutionary to make it this gimmick.

I would have loved to put all of these images in one gif, but that messed up with the colours so bad that I could not bear it. So, be ready for the image dump!

Anype (derived from Any type) would be known as the elemental pokémon as a double-entendre. It's elemental because it can be any element, or as they're known in universe, type. And also elemental because of basic, as I'm referencing it's a simple life form. Stats like he would be slow, mediocre in everything else, but with a decent amount of HP.

As for abilities, I'm also introducing a new one here, Type Overflow. Type Overflow would work like a Pixilate or Aerilate, but instead of being tied to a pokémon type, it would transform it into the first type of a Pokémon. I'm just wording it like that in the case I decide to add it to another mons that could be double type. Color Change felt appropiate as a hidden ability, although I doubt it would actually change it in a theoretical game? You could explain it as that it can still *absorb* the type of the attacks it receives and that overpowers the energy it possesses already.

It's a genderless pokémon, with no evolutionary line, and its description in universe could be the one in the images: Its cells barely show any tissue differenciation, instead portraying properties of types depending on what it absorbs on its environment. It is theorized that it's one of the first complex creatures that could be considered a full-fledged Pokémon.

I honestly have issues summarizing everything I want to say in that kind of space, but I was juggling not falling into evolutionary theories, as it's not confirmed if pokémon had common ancestors or if it falls into Arceus creationism. We have fossils, and paradoxes now, but it's still up in the air. Which I think it's where the franchise shines, in being vague enough to allow possibilities to coexist.

For the colours I chose, I picked up the primary colour of the type and used it as the main colour, and I went for a pastel complimentary colour that could sell more the type, if needed be being wary of the confusion between types with main colour that are similar. One of the reasons I went for the base one is to check the saturations and values, I wanted to be a nice contrast even without the hue shift. For the shiny, I went for a black body. I was thinking about making it white to emulate the bleaching of the sponges, but decided against it to go for a more edgy look, leaving the accent colours to be the ones of the normal sprite to not be confusing with the colours of the type. Making the fire shiny blue, or the grass shiny orange would make it confusing at first glance even if it can be explained, because there are so many different types to take care of.

Habitat-wise, I think this creature could be at home in some kind of colourful reef, being the main pokémon available in its area, like an Unown would be in the ruins! How would this place have energy of every type available? That's a problem for future me if I go further with this!

But wait, there's more! I didn't only work on the statics. I did animation for the front sprites, and the icon! I didn't work on the back one, due to time constraints, and I won't be showing them all, because honestly, the folder that has only stuff from this fakemon has 246 files. Imagine! So we'll look at the base ones, if you allow me:

If you're interested, we could go for animating the backsprites too, maybe on stream! But for now, I think I did enough here for just one fakemon. I don't know if I'll have the time to finish more for next week, but I'll try to go for these kind of posts on Fridays!

Thanks for reading, please let me know if you're interested in any kind of other fakemon posts or suggestions, and I'll see you around!

 

Scalloped clouds nails tutorial

This week's tutorial is, for the first time, a look that can be achieved without any kind of tools! You will only need the brushes that come in the bottles of nail polish! We're gonna paint scalloped waves, or clouds, or really whatever it inspires you with different colours. My personal choice was to make it like this:

 

As you can see, this nail has three different areas. The cuticle area is a darker emerald green, then we have a stripe of gold and the free edge has a more desaturated green with bigger flakes. This is highly customizable. You can do each stripe as wide as you want and as narrow as you have the ability to do so! Let's see specifically which polishes I used, I can tell you they were fairly unexpensive:

Again, I'm using three polishes from the same brand. It's fairly comfortable to pick from the same brand though I probably should use more varied polishes. I don't want you to feel overwhelmed with having to find the exact same ones and that's why I tend to not mix too many brands. Tell me what you think of this! The polishes are:

• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Glint Collection Nº331
• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Moon Light Nº416
• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Metallic is the new Black Nº500

A characteristic that these three polishes have, and that I recommend yours to have, is that they are quite opaque. Mine are almost one coaters, but with a slightly thicker coat and careful application, these three can be decent enough. My gold in particular was a bit more streaky and difficult to reach to opacity, but it was still possible.

I swear this is super easy to achieve, so let's start with the step by step:

The first step is painting your nail with the colour you prefer. As I stated earlier, this was one coat, even though it required a bit of a careful application. Let it dry enough until the point to be able to apply a second coat, but this time, we're gonna do it differently:

Here you can say why my gold was not the best for this particular purpose, as it showed a bit of brush strokes. How did I apply it? Easy: instead of trying to cover my nail with my strokes, I just started applying it at a random height on my nail that I wanted, and swiped down. Repeated a couple more times at different heights. I will admit, I fiddled a bit with my brush to perfect the shapes as I wanted them but I didn't use any additional tools. Practice the pressure of your brush to get the desired arch and look. It will depend on the brush that your particular polish has. These polishes in particular have a round brush, even though my preference is flat wide, but honestly it might have played to my advantage in particular, as it didn't get that wide of a scallop!

You can leave the look there with a blue background and a white cloud, for example, or go the extra mile: doing it again! And with this, you can decide to do a different pattern, do a more even distribution of the polishes... I personally decided to be adventurous and try to replicate the shape leaving a thin golden strip. I will admit this is less forgiving than other configurations, so if you don't feel confident, try out one of the other options I've suggested!

Personally I think this combination called for this combination as the two greens are very close in hue so the thin strip gave it an element of interest and separation.

In my experience, I used opaque enough polishes that I only needed one coat, a swipe with a bit more polish of the usual, but of course you can try to go for sheer polishes and play with layers. I don't know if you would be interested in me trying to do the same techniques that I've already done with different polishes and providing diverse results, explaining why?

Anyways, the inspiration here? Actually... I have to share terrible news. I broke a nail and I couldn't save it, so I had to file the down. And I've decided that this year I would NOT settle down for a basic manicure. But also I'm getting nail mail too! By the point this post is published, it will be in my hands... and I'll fight to not have it on my nails! So I needed something easy, visually effective...

And I did this exact look! Then, I decided it looked nice, so that's why it's this week's tutorial! For that reason, we have a couple of extra photos, so let me show you as an extra, a picture of this same hand with flash, to show the differences in the formulas:

 

That's it for this week's post, I truly hope you do enjoy it and this post has a third question that you can comment, if you'd like to read a tutorial for any nail look I've published in posts like What I wore on January 2025 please feel free to contact me and let me know! Sometimes, analysis paralysis makes difficult to know exactly what to do in a tutorial, I want to deliver looks that you'll like! Thanks for reading and see you all in the next one, which might probably be a flashier one.

Fakemon types, I can't keep things simple

Today's post is not about nails. Don't be alarmed, I'm fine, nothing bad happened. I might have mentioned it, but I'm also a pixel artist that started out with the Pokémon style, and one of the things in my bucket list, so to speak, is to create my own fan region. I have been working on a template for presentations of each creature, working in a different way than I'm used to just to have the flexibility of switching things up in each one. What do I mean by that? Well, let me show you:

 

Excuse the distortion effects, I'm not gonna give you the base, come on. But I have the ability to switch easily colours around to suit the mood of the fakemon and such. You can see that in the left side there are two hexagons. Those are meant for the types of the fakemon. I wanted to revamp a couple of types because I felt they were incomplete or too skewed. And that made me do the same with another one and... add four new types. And decide that I didn't want to combine "Normal" with anything else so it's out of the question, why would you be normal when you can have a cool element?

Let me show you the icons I made for them:

 

As you can see, I also made an icon for normal. Even though I don't plan on making any Normal type Fakemon, I don't plan on fully gutting it, the attacks can, and honestly, should stay. I'm not a game designer, but this gives them the chance to be slightly stronger than a typed attack, as there will be no STAB for them!

 The icons, in order, depict these types:

• Normal
• Fire
• Fighting
• Water
• Air (instead of Flying)
• Plant
• Poison
• Electric
• Ground
• Psychic
• Rock
• Ice
• Bug
• Dragon
• Ghost
• Shade (instead of Dark)
• Metal (instead of Steel)
• Fairy
• Sound
• Polymer
• Oneiric
• Edible

Air and Metal felt more general than Flying and Steel. The latter just irked me, specially with official pokémon that are NOT steel but another metal. Get your facts straight, come on. Flying feels more like a characteristic, and not an element. Also, its relationship with Normal makes me uncomfortable, it's unable (aside from Tornadus) to be on its own and, honestly, what. Air allows me to slap the type to elementals that are not flying and in general reduce confusion.

And these sparked the internal discussion of "well, Dark is also a characteristic... and in Japanese it's Evil type..." and I couldn't find a perfect solution as a replacement. So instead, I merged both of them into Shade. Shady kinda represents both of them. I would have kept Dark if I had a Light type, but decided against it. This would honestly take the place of Fairy, which it kinda does in a way, but Fairy allows me to go for more mythological inspirations if I want.

And for the new types, I feel like Sound doesn't even require an explanation at this point, specially after eliminating Normal as a pokémon type, which was, honestly, one of the last niches of normalcy.

Polymer is a type that's based on materials. We have rock and metal, so why not a pokémon that's made of plastic. Polymer is the type of compounds plastics are, and calling it polymer also allows me to go for other kind of polymers that are not considered plastic if the inspiration strikes. So technically, I could made a protein pokémon that's polymer, as... proteins are, indeed, proteins. Wait, I'm cooking there...

The last two types were born from splitting original types. I came to the conclusion that Psychic for a long time has been a literal compilation of everything mystical. Brain power (the main Psychic), myths before Fairy, manipulating sleep (Oneiric), space and cosmos (Cosmic), and I'm not even looking at a list, I could pinpoint probably more ways to split Psychic.

And Edible comes from a place of, honestly, spite. Around half of the pure Fairy types introduced after the creation of the type have been some sort of food-based creature. Also there are others in other types that either resemble or are inspired by foods, too, so it's not like it's new. My line in the sand is that the creature should not be fully eaten or get any kind of exogenous process to become the food. So Slowpoke tails don't count, people eat them but they're not meant to. But if a lizard creature sheds and those sheds are a treat, this one would count.

And that's it, that's my explanation on how I'm planning to move forward with this silly little project of mine. I haven't fully fledged the type interactions but I can tell you that game design is my passion, derogatory, so I might revamp also the status effects and more. You know me, I cannot take it easy.

I don't want to make promises but I may strive for Fakémon Friday posts, while keeping the Nail Sundays, and leaving Wednesdays for other kinds of posts like this one. It's not a promise or expectation, just an idea that I could explore and ask for feedback.

 Thanks for reading and see you next time!

French polka heart nails tutorial

Today's tutorial is a look perfect for the upcoming St. Valentine's Day, or for anyone feeling a little bit more classic or demure. We're gonna learn how to make almost perfect hearts with the least amount of effort, and a nice idea to elevate the look of our nail with not much effort with a polka dot pattern only on our free edge:

Please take into consideration that I don't own nail polishes in other colours that are not green, so that's why it's my choice as the background colour. Don't hesitate to change it for your favourite pink or red. Or feel adventurous, change the colours! Make your hearts brown because they're chocolates, go wild!

Let's review the items we're going to use for this look:

 I've used these two polishes:

• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Acid Collection Nº343
• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Sweet PWR Nº398

I also used a dotting tool and a small detailer brush, shown in the picture. Both are the key items to make the hearts that you want to. You want to start with your canvas being opaque:

For simplicity and clarity, I've chosen a plain background, but this technique for hearts is simple and effective so you can get a little more extreme with the backgrounds, as other tutorials that I've explained as gradients or marbles. First, you got to put two dots touching each other, trying to make them the same size. To do so, reload your dotting tool inbetween both dots. You can check a more detailed explanation in my Dotted chain nails tutorial if you want some pointers on how to make your dots as you want them:

 

 

 

As you can see, my dots are not perfect, but we can move on from here. Do the adjustments you feel like you have to do before proceeding with your next step. You don't want to be too slow with this step as you'd rather have these dots still workable for the next step. Also, the size of your heart will be determined by your dotting tool. Use a different size for different results!

 

What you want now is to take your detailer brush and more of the same polish, and try to draw a line diagonally from your dot below until the center, and the same from the other side. Don't load your brush too much, it's not necessary. This will create a nice outline for your heart. When you're happy with it, fill it in with the same polish and brush and... that's it! You have a heart!

 

 My heart was a bit on the big side for demonstrative purposes, as I used my biggest dotting tool. You can leave it here or add more hearts to your nail, as you desire. But I decided to go the extra mile and go for a cute polka dot design making a sort of frame for this nail. You can approach this any way you'd approach this kind of pattern, column-wise, row-wise or even making V-shapes. I'd go for the last one for the french line, to ensure it kind of mimics the smile line you want to achieve:

 

 You can tell I messed up my dots close to the heart and made them a bit bigger than intended, but pretend they're correctly sized. I used the other end of that particular dotting tool, which has a way smaller dot on it, to do the rest of the dots. I started with the dot under the heart, and then went from there. Estimate how many dots can you fit in your free edge, this might change depending on your nail shape. My swatch sticks feature a square free edge so I found like this approach let me estimate better. Once you have that ready, you can start going in V-shapes around, again, to ensure you're not going too much into your nail bed. 

 

The size of my heart made it so the illusion was a bit more rounded, and not a full on chevron. Smile lines resemble a parabolic shape, so in the center the variation is slower than in the edges, by the sidewalls. Depending on style, you can make the paraboles more pronounced, like in this case, or way less dramatic and more natural, up to your personal preferences and taste.

 

I'd recommend waiting for several minutes until the dots and heart have time to dry down to avoid smudging. As you can see in the shadow on the right side of the nail, the dots don't lay flat on the nail and that will mess your manicure up if you don't let it harden. Remember to float your top coat any time you're doing any kind of nail art too to reduce or eliminate smudging, too!

 

I hope you liked this nail art that is quite out of my comfort zone. I'm not one to add hearts to my real nails and I'm always missing St. Valentine's Day, but I thought that this blog had no excuse to not give an honest try to a look that could work for anyone wanting a different style than what I have for myself, and I think I achieved that goal. So tell me, will you give this technique a try? Do you know any other way to make perfect hearts? If you have any kind of question, please ask away and I will try my best to answer, and thanks for reading!