Vinyl fish pond nails tutorial

We are still learning the basics of nail art, and one of the tools that I haven’t talked about is nail vinyls. They’re basically a stencil that you place on a dry nail to paint over them and then remove, exposing the image on the nail with ease. That way, you can have nail arts like these fishes on your nail without freehanding:

You can find them in two different ways: complete nail vinyls and just shapes and guides. The former are less versatile, as they are meant to go over the entire nail, defining the design with little more to do than positioning. The latter, on the other hand, through their positioning allow more design varieties, usually. Both work functionally the same, so let’s see how. The materials we’re going to use today are:

The polishes I’m using are:

• Holo Taco Lite Link
• Holo Taco Missed Shift

And the nail vinyl is from a cheap package from Amazon, they come in a big chunk with several designs. To be honest, these fishes were not something I was excited to use on my actual nails and only two of them were available, so I used one of them in a previous test, and this one for the purposes of this tutorial.

But what do you want to do to use these nail vinyls? Well, let’s start with our canvas. You need to have your background as you please, I just make Lite Link reach opacity:

This is very very important: you must ensure your polish is fully dry for the next steps to work properly. I used a quick dry top coat to make certain of that. Save yourself headaches, seal your base with a good top coat.

Peel the vinyl you want to use and place it on the nail in the spot you want. You may use a tool for this step, I used flat tweezers to help me. Also bending the backing of the vinyl to get a corner going was my way to go, if that helps you.

Another thing you may want to do, I did it, is using scissors to create small incisions close to the center of the sides of the vinyls. Why so? It helps it to accomodate to the curve of the nail!

After this picture, I gave a second press to the vinyl, as it got away from the bottom left corner, as you can see. Do not let that happen, you want your vinyl to be tight-fitted, as that will create the seal between the areas you don’t want paint on and the areas you do!

When you have it perfectly stuck, just get your second colour and… paint it! Try to make an even, opaque coat, but don’t make the polish coat too thick. And when it’s painted, don’t hesitate: peel it off. I recommend tweezers to avoid messing up your fingers.

I had to clean a little bit a couple of shapes because I applied my polish a little bit too thick, to avoid transparency issues from the multichrome. Do not worry, work quick and with as little acetone as possible (or none at all), clean with your preferred brush. The top coat that you sure used to protect your base colour would help a lot to make sure you don’t accidentally mess it up, just don’t use much remover or pressure and you’ll be fine.

Wait until you seal this with another coat of top coat, or you’ll risk smudging your results. And float it, always float your top coats when dealing with any kind of nail art, or just in general, honestly, to avoid transfering your polish to your top coat brush.

And this is it. We might go through different techniques and designs that use nail vinyls in different ways in the future, but I’m focusing on the basics right now to really be on the same page in more complex designs. I think I could kind of figure out my camera a little bit better, even if shimmers get a bit overexposed and blurry, so that’s an improvement!

I hope you enjoyed this description and I will see you next week! I don’t really know if we will do another “basic technique” or we’ll go a little bit more crazy, if you have any suggestions please don’t hesitate to let me know and thanks for reading!