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!