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!