Blobbicure nails tutorial

Today we're going to be working on a deceptively simple technique that requires absolutely no tools, but has so many little caveats that I feel deserves its own spot here. Blobbicures are a style of nail art I don't tend to gravitate towards and it's sheer laziness and clumsiness: it requires a longer drying time than other techniques and I would just seethe hitting my nails while still wet. So, let's learn together how to do them and what would we need, which honestly... it's not much!

 

The base principle of the blobbicure is dropping blobs of a nail polish over a wet, thick coat of another. That's why the result may look not smooth, but a top coat will get rid of this, anyways. So, let's get right into this. What do we need to do a blobbicure? Two polishes. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Let's review which ones I used:

My polishes for today are from a dollar store brand. Honestly the shades are so pretty and you know I'm obsessed with neon green! They are:

• Yes Love 9 days Gel effect's 494
• Yes Love 9 days Gel effect's 508

The technique is very simple to execute, I would recommend to get your base to opacity or close to it, as you don't want to double guess when you're going to do this. Time is everything in a blobbicure, as you will see!

 

494 is a bit chalky, which I don't truly mind a lot when working with it normally, but it might be an issue in this particular nail art. We'll discuss it later. For now, what you want to know is that you have to work fast from now on. Get ready, unscrew both polishes, and apply a thick coat of your base colour. Do not hesitate to redip your brush into the bottle to get more polish, you truly want your coat to be on the thicker side, and don't let it dry, grab your second colour and drop it on top. You can absolutely make the blob of nail polish touch the surface, just don't push into it to avoid cross contamination into your bottle. Redip as many times as you need to get the blobs of the size you want. And that's the technique!

You can create organic shapes with this technique, like imitating mushrooms, for example, or just make it abstract and call it a day, like me.

Now, let's talk about differences in results: the formula of your polishes of choice and the brushes can make a huge impact on how it will work and spread around. Thicker polishes and smaller brushes will not spread as much, as they will face more resistence, scientifically speaking, to break the tension. My pastel neon was in the thicker, chalky side, so my blobs of neon didn't spread much, as even if it tried to do so, you can almost see how the lighter shade was making a barrier for it and drying on top. I have done tests with other polishes, and there are other formulas that spread way better, pushing other blobs on the nail and creating unique shapes. So, it's experimentation, and informed guesses on what should you expect.

The last step would be your top coat, and I'd recommend you to wait for a bit for that thick coat to dry a bit. Top coat should help everything dry, but if it's too wet and mushy, it can create a mess inside and not allow to cure the product properly, being easy to dent and mess up your manicure, so be patient and try not to do anything because believe me: you're gonna have a dent, this coat is not to be messed up with.

Do let me know if you want more information or tries on this, or if I even should play with this technique on my own real nails. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next time!

Spring Cleaning nails tutorial

Welcome to the first nail tutorial of spring here in the Northern Hemisphere! I don't really like long elaborate storytimes before tutorials when I look for things on blogs, like recipes being extremely guilty of this, so I'll keep this one very very short: The initial plan was to make flowers, but honestly, coming from two plant based nail tutorials like Animal Crossing furniture on grass and Lucky Clover fields, I thought it was overkill to go for a third one in a row. My house is ending some renovations so it is dustier than usual, despite our best efforts, as that kind of tile and mortar dust is way way finer and lingers in the air way more, so I came up with this concept: Spring Cleaning nails. Seasonally appropiate.

 

I kinda added many textures and things onto the same nail so let's take it step by step! The first one is to know which polishes I used. Funnily enough, I think all of them are discontinued, but what can I say:

 For this nail, I used:

• Deliplus Force Nº990
• Deliplus Force Nº991
• Kiko Milano Nº321
• Kiko Milano Nº392
• Kiko Milano Sun Pearl Nº427

The two browns are meant to replicate wood, so let's work on it. My rendition is not very striking in pictures as the two shades are a little bit too close but it was aiming for a realistic palette. First step, painting your nail brown to opacity. I used the Kiko Milano brown as it was lighter:

Please do ignore the green reflection on the side, as I caught it but a bit too late to redo this picture. Next up, you can use your darker brown and a striping brush to create abstract lines simulating the grain of the wood:

 

You don't want your nails to be perfect whatsoever, and you can even play around with making a knot on the grain, it's quite easy and effective to convey the texture easily.

So, okay, I said that we were going to do spring cleaning, so why are we making wood? Because it will be our dirty surface to clean up, think of it as a table, a plank, not a tree. We want to make this dirty, ironically! So, we're gonna draw an imaginary line, in my case, it's slanted, and we're going to messily add splotches of the two greens, for a little bit of variety.

Just in case, let me add that you can use striping tape or a nail vinyl to keep your line perfect, but if you do, remember to use a quick dry top coat and let it dry before applying your guideline!

A technique that helped me a bunch is to add small details with a dry brush, stippling softly. This technique can also be used to create cloudy effects, but undeniably that would require another colour palette and shape language to work. Now, you have a clean part and a dirty part on your nail. To add a little bit of an extra clarification to that, we can add a blob of a  contrasting shade, so it would emulate the cloth we're using to do the clean up. For that, I used the warm green with golden shimmer. Honestly that polish has way less of a fill line than it should with how much I enjoyed and cherished it!

 

My technique was drawing the outline with a detail brush and then filling the shape with the bottle brush. Not very precise at all. The irregularities make it imply the folds the cloth would have being partially grabbed and dragged along the surface. With this, we have drawn a dirty surface and a cloth cleaning it up in one swipe. I wish this happened in real life that easily!

Now, we should apply our top coat. But this is not over, we can go a bit further with the look: we should leave the clean part glossy, to simulate the luster of a pristine surface, while applying to the dirty part of the nail a matte top coat. I used Essence's Super Matte. This contrast helps differenciate even further the two sections.

For the cloth, I applied a sugary top coat, specifically Essence's Sugar Touch. But you can emulate this easily applying a dense shimmer to the cloth and using matte top coat. The sugary effect is iridescent shimmer in a matte base, so it doesn't give actual texture, only emulates it visually.

 And this would be your finished look! Feel free to change up shades, the cloth can be any colour you want, the things you have to clean can be white or light gray to emulate dust, instead of a more moldy substance, you can experiment with other kinds of surfaces like marble, metal... The possibilities are endless.

Let me know if you would be interested in tutorials to make different kind of flowers on your nails, we can work on several depictions and kinds! Also please do let me know if you'd like me to make posts about nail art and polish experimentation, trying to emulate and dupe products so you don't have to spend more money or have variety at home. I am quite interested in this field and maybe spicing it up could be interesting.

 Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!

Lucky Clover Field nails tutorial

Spring is getting closer and closer, but we're still not there. But you know what's closer and is way on brand with me? Saint Patrick's day! You cannot give me a day in which you're expected to go all out on green and pretend I'll act normal! I don't truly partake in this celebration, it's not a thing around here, so I don't want to step on anyone's toes. So I'll just take one of the iconic elements that are associated with that festivity but without claiming it on my own, are we okay with that?

But yes, I'm going to be painting clovers today! The base shape looks convoluted but don't worry, as we're gonna go through a failproof method that I've already taught you!

 

I've decided to put a full on field on my nail, and I've also used polishes with a finish that may not be the best for photographing, but I can assure you that in real life they look quite great. So, which are the polishes that caught my eye to do this? I'm glad you asked!

 I've used these three Holo Taco polishes for today's nail:

• Holo Taco's Sour Note
• Holo Taco's Foiled Again
• Holo Taco's Mint Money

I've also used, not pictured, dotting tools and a small detailer brush. And I'm gonna link the most relevant tutorial here: French polka heart nails tutorial. You'll soon understand why!

But first, let's start with the basics: Your base colour, which in my case is Sour Note.

I felt that this shade could replicate a very vibrant field, so that's why I went with it, contrasting with the more cool toned greens that I used for the clovers. And how will the tools I've laid out for you come into play? Well, we're gonna make our clovers using hearts! Let's paint one on our nail with that same technique of the other tutorial:

 

How to proceed from here? Let's draw more hearts, making the points either connected or, my personal preference, point at each other with a tiny gap in the middle. I'm not going for a realistic look whatsoever, so that depiction suffices. It also doubles, not intentionally, as the logo of a certain infamous website, if that's what you're going after.

You can see that my hearts are not exactly perfect but that's okay for me. That's your clover, you did it! You may choose your size differently if you want. Take into account that these nails are quite large, so in a natural shorter nail that size would totally fill a good chunk of it and you'd like to not add more to it. But we can go for a little bit more of definition and visual interest here. Leave your polish to touch dry, and then, choose a different dotting tool, a different colour, and draw hearts using the same technique. You can layer them until you're satisfied with the effect! I went for three layers, so the outer and inner layer would be the darker forest green, but a line of mint would be visible:

This would be the advanced clover that I would go for if you're looking for clarity. I just wanted to add more to make it a field, and not just a clover. I wanted for this to be the only 4 leaf clover, so for the rest, I will use three hearts per clover, not making them as tightly close together.

For the smallest ones in the middle, I just placed three dots together. Going for more definition would be a fool's errand and nobody looks as closely at our nails. I know. Tragic.

As you can see, I used one of the two metallics to draw those other clovers. I didn't want to take that much attention from the main clover event, honestly. I'd recommend, as always with nail art, to wait as much as you can and float your top coat to avoid smearing your design.

This day I did this nail was a bit of a nightmare, for photography. We had alternating sunny moments with flash rains, so my light got quite inconsistent and it's very difficult to account for that, but getting more specialized equipment feels non-relevant for me at this point. In any case, I'll eventually will want to get all of these tutorials and get a nice light and such and being able to retake all the photos consistently. I might do a post like that as a closing of the year, but I haven't decided yet. Would you be interested in that?

In any case, I am at the verge for next week's tutorial, as I had an idea to make a spring tutorial but I am unsure if I want to use three times in a row a similar topic. I will make it, sooner rather than later, but maybe should I give one or two weeks in between, or go for it directly? Let me know and thanks for reading!

Animal Crossing furniture on grass nails tutorial

Welcome to the tenth nail art tutorial that I've done. I thought I wanted to try and top myself due to such a number, so again I doubted on which idea to go for... and I ended up going for two things at once. Let's do this Animal Crossing grass nail with a piece of furniture on top. Littering, I know, what a role model!

 

As you can see, this look has two layers to it. Well, honestly, these are more than two layers of nail polish, but I think you can understand what I meant. First, we're going to fake the grass of an Animal Crossing game on our nail, and then, we'll drop the furniture in the middle of it. Let's begin reviewing the shades I used, though of course you can look for others. Maybe you want fall grass, who knows?

 

My selection of polishes for today were my green holographic Holo Tacos and then a couple of crèmes for the Animal Crossing leaf on top. This deserved using them:

• Holo Taco's Green Taffy
• Holo Taco's Full Charge
• Holo Taco's Mint Mojito
• Holo Taco's Lost in the Woods
• Holo Taco's Not Milky White
• Holo Taco's Green Screen

I know that I'm using two discontinued polishes, and believe me, it pains me more than any other. Specially Full Charge, you can see my fill line and it's looking rough. My fill line for Green Taffy is similar, but I could snatch a second bottle for a back up. I wasn't that lucky with the discontinued holo.

In any case, let's begin with the first thing we do always: after your base coat, apply your base colour until opacity. In my case, it was Green Taffy:

Next, we're going to simulate Animal Crossing grass. I'm using this image as reference:

So, Animal Crossing grass is made of triangles of different sizes and orientations in various shades of green over the green background. Perfect for me. I started with Full Charge, doing a couple of bigger triangles and several smaller ones. Make sure not to overdo it, or else you won't have enough space. I used a detailer brush for mine. For the big ones, I started making the outline and then filling them in with a bit more of polish. The small ones used the opposite technique, place a small drop of polish with my brush and extending it a bit until it resembled a triangle enough:

 

The holographic makes it look a bit more cohesive, which maybe is not the best idea for this kind of photograph, specially when I'm dealing with real life circumstances that don't allow me to take photos the way I'd prefer to, but we move on. I don't think I'm cracking a secret code when I tell you that the next steps are repeating these exact steps with your other two polishes. You don't want your shapes to touch, just be close enough. For colour distribution... I didn't do that well. I don't know if mapping out your nail is feasible but I can tell that I didn't do it. I just went for it and I think it got close enough!

 

You can leave it here if you want, after your top coat. This would be a nice look as a manicure with the rest of the design as accents, even! Experiment with different finishes. Crèmes would look stunning, also in matte. Or mix and match for a fun effect! I opted for holographics to give it a little bit of contrast compared to the Animal Crossing's iconic leaf on top being painted with crèmes.

For the leaf, yes, this is going to sound rough, but I free handed it. I had a reference on sight at all times. For the outline effect, my little secret here was doing the leaf first in white and then doing the leaf inside in green. Making an outline is something that I don't feel like I can accomplish, my line thickness would not be super consistent, so I decided to do the leaf in white first:

I know it looks a bit lumpy bit it was more visual than actually textured. What helped me here is to place your anchor points where you want your figure to be, and then, reference at sight, do your lines with enough paint to cover but not too much to drip around. That's why I preferred using an opaque white here! You can also put a top coat before drawing and using acrylic paint for an easier time fixing your mistakes, but I lived dangerously. After giving it ample time to dry, to avoid mixing it with the polish on top, we're going to paint it again but slightly smaller. The outlines will help a lot for you to draw the new shape, believe me, your guides will be there for you:

 

Consider that the white line inside the leaf is a result of the light there, not a great consistent line I painted. You can see that my green is not perfectly even, but it will settle and look more even. If not, you can use a second coat of this, carefully. After that, just apply your preferred top coat and enjoy not paying your debt to a particular tanuki.

I personally do not play Animal Crossing at the moment but I have had a big, and I mean, big phase of playing Animal Crossing for hours and hours every single day. I am one that gets very involved and focuses too much on things, which worked at the time but after several months, I just felt like I had everything how I wanted it and my brain didn't like just visiting my town for just a few minutes a day.

I would like to pay homage to other things like Pokémon, but honestly, my lack of other shades of nail polish make it difficult to paint a pokéball, as I don't have red. If you have any suggestion feel completely free to drop it below! And thanks for reading! I have my nails prepared for at least a couple of weeks, which will take a lot of weight off of me, expect them!

What I wore on February 2025?

 New month, who this? New nails, for sure. But we'll get to that! This month I did my nails substantially more than last month so this post will be a bit more complete, I hope!

First manicure of the month was on February first, actually. You could check that post of last month when I was already stating that the manicure had a couple of chips, and I needed a new manicure. I also noticed that I was using so much of Holo Taco so I went for another brand this time just for a change. And the manicure didn't live up to expectation:

I used Pull & Bear's Galactic Green and Today is Vibrant. Well, that was the problem: the gradient was not as vibrant as the polishes on their own. So, let me explain: I did a gradient from the green to the black, but both polishes had a silver shimmer in it to give it the metallic look. And when you use a sponge to gradient, the base and the coloured pigment gets absorbed but these kind of pigments stay on top, so the formula is changing already! I tried to save it with a dotticure on a side of the nail using the opposite colour. You can tell how vibrant the black looks on the dots compared to the tip of my nails! I might revisit this idea with crèmes to avoid this kind of washing down the polish.

My next manicure was me trying out another technique for myself! On February 8th, I had several nail stickers and sheets and I needed some neon green. I will tell you, neon green is the shade I've used the most in my life, literally several bottles emptied over the years. This one I'm using right now is from Deliplus' last year Neon release, and it's my second bottle of it. I need it on my nails. So I found this one of a honeycomb on my collection, and got high retrofuturism hacker vibes, so I went for it:

I will say that the sheet was not the best quality, it was a little bit too thick and it rippled on me a bit. I did the best to hide it, but honestly I can see so many mistakes of it laying flat. I will also say that my top coat didn't stick to it, at all. It was literally peeling off of it! I have to investigate and see what's going on. I'm a scientist, after all.

I even put on some fishnet gloves for it because it was giving tech femboy, and... yep I redid the pics:

Hey, I am not a professional nail vlogger, you can tell. But hey, maybe with time.

And here I want to introduce you to the drama, the trauma. I broke a nail. It was on the right hand but I am not like those other girls (nail bloggers) that have different manicures on both hands, even though, should I? Anyways, I had to basically cut them short! And as I cannot be seen without nail polish NOR nail art this year, I did something quite simple on February 13th:

Yes, I've already showed you on my Scalloped clouds nails tutorial how I did exactly these nails with three quite inexpensive polishes from Wild & Young. I honestly like that brand a lot, they're quite consistent in quality, interesting formulas for 1€, 1,5€. It allows me to get polishes that are similar not the same to just experiment a little bit more! These three are their Nº331, Nº416 and Nº500!

On February 18th, I had a bestie day with my bestie and we both decided: what if... we watermarble. And we did! She used three different polishes and I wanted to go for a more muted palette, so I chose Holo Taco's Modest Moss, Head Hunter and Foreshadow to give it a pop of hue contrast. The results? Judge by yourself:

It gave me such a strong camouflage vibe that I had to put a matte top coat. You can tell I still don't know how to draw in the bullseye, and I had issues dipping, but mostly on the other hand. It's my second time, so don't expect a tutorial of this soon. I want to practice way more before dropping (hah, see what I did here) a tutorial on it! Maybe some other kind of experimental post, but again, I'm not qualified.

Last manicure of this month is again another non-surprise. I had a chip, I needed something to cover it up, so new manicure on February 25th, the last of the month and the one I'm wearing as per the writing of this post. It's the Distressed Reciprocal gradient I did the last tutorial on! My actual nails have a slight difference, though. I used Holo Taco's Not Milky White and Monstera, but I topped it with a coat of Holo Taco's Celestial Lights to give me a better chance to hide some rougher texture I had on a couple nails trying different ways to do it:

I think it was successful at that. I'm quite happy with this manicure so far but when you're reading this post, I may have other thing on my nails. What will I present you next month? I still don't know!

Again, if you want some tutorial on other look that I did that doesn't have it or suggest some looks, please do let me know! I have several things planned for tutorials that are relevant in some seasons so the things in between get a little muddy as I don't want to release four tutorials explaining the same technique with different colour combos, I want them to have some twist. Same with my own nails.

Thanks for reading, and see you next month! Or sooner, if you follow my tutorials!

Distressed reciprocal gradient flag nails tutorial

As per the date I'm typing this tutorial, it's the day of my region and I thought it would be funny to replicate it on my nails. I could have gone for nail vynils for a clean look a regular gradient with a sponge like I explained previously, but I felt like doing it differently. We're going to go for a distressed look with a different tool, and we're gonna go for a reciprocal gradient, which means going from color A to color B and back to color A.

 

The strokes are visible, and the blend is rough, and that's intentionally the look. You can use it just for the distressed look or to create interesting textures like ocean and seafoam, if you want to use those different shades. This is a technique with a bit of a learning curve so let's review what we used for this look:

 

For this nail I used only these things:

• Holo Taco's Not Milky White
• Holo Taco's Monstera

And a fan brush! The weird brush all nail art sets include for some reason! Okay, I'll stop bashing it, but I will say that it's definitely a brush that is not used like a traditional one, and that's to its advantage.

Let's address the elephant in the room: Yes, I'm using a limited edition polish just because it colour matched greatly the actual inspiration, but the important thing is the technique, so don't be deterred and experiment with other polishes if you want. There are many different ways to do what I did, and honestly mine is not the most elegant, but it's the one that worked best for me. I like to start with an underpainting, in this case, a coat of my white:

 

I just used one coat, even if it's not perfect. I was not worried about making a pristine background, as I was going to cover it all with more nail polish but I wanted to have a bit of flat white to avoid the transparent plastic to peak through. I let it dry for a few minutes, enough for you to paint all your nails, honestly, not much. You will want some kind of protective barrier on your skin, being liquid latex or, honestly, glue. This is a swatch stick, so this won't be a necessary step for us. Then, I will stir controversy, this is what I did:

I applied a bit of polish on my nail in the places I wanted. Consider that this is bad practice, because I took a minute to snap this picture and show you, and that affected the underside of it, so work quickly here, and grab your fan brush! Put it as flat as possible and start stroking those polishes trying not to move it vertically across the nail too much. You want to spread the polish using the bristles, which will clump together a little bit. That's normal!

 

There are people that prefer to place the polish in another surface and pick it up with the fan brush. There's also the version of placing the polish directly on the brush. I just feel those options decreased the saturation a lot for me, which I don't know if it's human error but honestly, this worked way better for me. You may want to repeat this process more times to reach the look and opacity you want. That's what I did for the final result:

 

You can see slight unevenness in the surface that will transform into only visual texture after you apply you top coat, as it's really not very strong to not be evened out by your top coat. Let me reiterate that you will want to use a barrier on your skin to avoid a messy clean up, as you can see on my stick, even when I tried to be careful doing this technique.

I was on a bit of a slump this week, I didn't know what kind of nail art to do, and honestly, decided to keep on with the meme that I was doing on my actual hands, put my region's flag:

 

My blend on my actual nails wasn't as seamless but that's okay, that's fine. Honestly I was experimenting then and it didn't go as well as planned so that's why I'm doing this post to share my two cents if you want to try it. You can try it with just a regular gradient but honestly being returning or reciprocal made it easier for me to maneuver my brush and flip it if needed be. A one way gradient would work, obviously, but be careful not to put the opposite shades where you don't need them!

That's it for this week's tutorial, I hope you learned something about blending different polishes and try this with different finishes, not having to worry about being perfect gives this technique an edge when you want to be messy and bold!