I finally finished this line! Today, we're going to be talking about my first double typed fakemon in this project, Posble, and its evolution, Maretal.
They have a long story with me, Posble was one of the first things I wanted to create because the type combination was unique and I wanted to give it a try. Years later, it's still not used by the official source! Anyways, let's see them first and then we'll talk about what went on here:
Since the first draft, I knew I wanted to make this combination one of those pokémon that basically tells you in the dex entry that it's the spirit of someone that died in specific conditions, but avoiding that trope. So I thought a miner was the perfect idea, giving it a helmet to have some contrast. Another thing I wanted for this line is to have no face. At least, not the usual one with two eyes, a mouth... that's why I preferred to imply the eye in both designs, to still give it something that can feel familiar and recognisable.
Maretal has had many iterations with other names in the past, but all felt like they failed in the same thing: they felt like Posble, but big and with a hole in the middle. I knew I wanted the geode-like hole in the middle of its main body, so what to attach to it was the main focus to make it feel different and unique. Initially, I tried to make it, weirdly enough, too creature-like, and it made it feel clunky, uninspired, like a regular golem but broken. It was thinking out of the box and making it not be symmetrical, or even needing to imply actual movement, what saved it for me.
I think that the element that really sold me the idea is the cage with the small spirit inside. It references how miners used to carry small cages with birds as an oxygen test. If the bird dies, well, get out immediately! It feels cruel, nowadays, and I didn't have the resolution to play around with a companion, like a pokémon like Skeledirge has, so it is just a wisp with no discernible features. It still sells the point that something caged died there, but in a way that could be interpreted as another metallic thing that was lying around and the creature assimilated.
I am unsure if this type combo would fit the role of the regular rock type in a cave, like Geodude or Roggenrola could be, but honestly I am not balance team, so for now, it could work!
This post gives closure to an idea that was marinating in my head for actual years, as I feel satisfied with Maretal's iteration, and I feel it's a nice final stage.
For palette, the regular one was something I decided early on, but the shiny was also something that took a bit to decide. The contrast between yellow and purple felt great, complimentary colours and all that. And making the rock grey felt correct. I experimented with more neon colours, like orange or lime green, and their complimentary shades, blue and red, specifically. The orange and blue one was the one I was going to go for, as the red made it look a bit too evil for my liking for this line. Also orange felt like a nice shade as I've seen miner helmets in that shade. But also, the colour that's not yellow that I've seen the most is white, so I decided to experiment and then the green, eerie jade shade felt natural. Totally not a biased opinion. Not at all.
These posts take a long time to make, specially because of what I'm going to show you next, which is the animations and backsprites, so if you took the time to read this, thank you so much and I'd appreciate your feedback and suggestions! For next time, I don't know which one of the ideas will come to life, so I won't corner myself teasing anything! But I hope I can show nice things!
I'm bringing today a tutorial about getting a bit more of space. I had a bit of a creative slump, because this week has been quite hot in my area, but didn't want to start with summer ideas so early for me. I don't enjoy summer, as I live in quite a hot climate, and summer doesn't last 2 to 3 months, but more akin to almost 5, well into spooky season. Of course, I can understand than people in other climates can feel the same with winter if they live more in the north than me, but this is my blog and I complain about summer if I want. So I was blanking on ideas for now and I ended up going to space:
What this relies on is on a cosmetic sponge. We can use them to do something else than gradients, and honestly I don't use mine enough. Sponges are great to create an asymmetrical lay down of colour that can recreate many textures visually, while being flat on the nail. Today I used it in two places: the nebula on the space and on the planet to give it some colour interest. The holographic part comes from my polish selection, as they are all linear holos:
Let's name them:
Holo Taco's Electrostatic
Holo Taco's Featured Guest
Holo Taco's Green Taffy
Holo Taco's Full Charge
Holo Taco's Mint Mojito
I also used that specific cosmetic sponge. I bought a pack of them several years ago and it's weird to use, as it's a bit too flat to have a good grip for regular full nail gradients, so that's why I use them for this narrower uses or for specific purposes like this one, but you can use your regular triangle shaped ones, this is a great way to get the most of a small clean piece that you can't comfortably hold for a full gradient.
I also must tell you again: my Green Taffy is not as it should be: it's more jelly because of overthinning and thinning several times. You can see the fill line, it's basically in its last legs. Don't worry, I have a back up. But I would love to use up the entirety of the bottle, as I did with my bottle of Mint Money. I would also do that with Full Charge but I missed on the chance of getting a second bottle and I cry every day for that. Cristine, please, I know you won't rerelease that shade, but DM me, I'll give you my address, send me a bottle of yours or something, please, I implore you.
Anyways! Enough of me crying over greens, let's go to space!
This is one coat of Electrostatic, and I felt it was already opaque. In a real manicure, I would have used two coats, not for opacity but for holographic payoff, but for demonstration purposes, I skipped out on it. The actual tutorial comes here. I used tweezers to rip of a piece of that sponge. You want to rip it, not cut it, as you will rely on the asymmetry on the rip. Cutting with scissors would leave a flat surface that won't give you the same result. Specially in such a dense cosmetic sponge like that.
You can see the contrast of the front, which is flat, with the side, having those ridges. You will dab your nail polish of choice on a section of those ridges, and then dab onto your nail in the desired areas. I did that with Featured Guest as I wanted the milkier white to give me a nebulous look. You can do several coats, to build it up to a more desired result. As a general refresher: using a sponge will reduce the opacity of your polish, so if you use a generally less opaque formula, you will need more coats. Holo Taco's linear holos are quite opaque, with ironically the exception of Featured Guest, so I needed a couple of coats, but it was desired in this particular instance, as I got more variation. Crèmes would be more drastic, so if you want something way more obvious, I'd recommend that.
I also painted green in a circular shape in the corner of my nail. This is where my overthinned Green Taffy comes into play, as my planet looks way darker than intended due to that. I tell you this because I forgot to control the picture after the sponging here and that pic is blurry and can't be used. I'm sorry for the subpar tutorial:
A flat planet looks boring, so let's play with the same technique to give it variation. I applied Full Charge to another section of that sponge and did the same technique, just cointaining it on the surface or the planet. I also layered another lighter coat of Green Taffy with the same technique. You can add many colours to this, it's a matter of contrast, at the end of the day:
For visibility purposes, I added an outline of Mint Mojito and another mint planet in the background:
The second planet ended up a bit bulky, as you can see, so I left this rest for around 20 minutes before applying my top coat. It ended up being encased perfectly! Holo wants top coat to shine properly, and my light is definitely not the ideal for it, as ir more in the diffuse side, but my set up is very much not professional. Trust me, in real life it looks good:
As with gradients, places that already have polish change structurally as this product dries, so you cannot reuse the exact same section, but I didn't rip off new places of sponge to get the gradients in the planet. How so? I just used other clean sections:
Do ignore the green on the back, it was basically me dropping the sponge in a bad place, oops. But you can see that I used different places of the sponge to apply different colours and that way I have a sponge without just one corner, not three. I must report that these pieces must be disposed like rubber. You can't get it out in a significant way.
I hope you enjoyed this technique, next week we're going to play with something a bit more complex, if plans go through! Do tell me which other ways and what colours would you use for this technique, and see you next week!
Today's tutorial includes three designs! They're all inspired by different Pokémon faces, because even if I'm showing you different Pokémon, what I'm truly showing you is to simplify cartoon faces to be able to do them in smaller steps. As per my nail polish collection, I require to play with green designs, and per my personal biases, I'm into grass type. I know it's weird I create more Fakemon from other types, don't worry about it:
We're going to be working on these three designs: Smoliv, Rowlet and Cradily, my favourite Pokémon ever that I truly needed to play around. These nails are not top coated, so some of the textures that you see would feel different under the glossy finish. In this tutorial, as I said, we're going to be analyzing how to simplify these cartoon faces to get, even if not the most accurate depictions, something that can be identified as such! You'll only need a brush and if you're more comfortable with it, a dotting tool!
I'll start with Smoliv: It is a small olive with a shaky face and an olive on top, with leaves between its main body and the one on top. Time to show the polishes:
I've used two different olive greens, one more yellow than the other, to accomodate for Smoliv's original palette, even though they're not full colour accurate. It's more about making al the shades making sense together and making them look intentional:
Revlon Colorstay Gel Envy's 220 In the money
Holo Taco's Modest Moss
Holo Taco's Not Pressed
Holo Taco's One Coat Black
Holo Taco's Not Milky White
I started with a base of the greener of the two olives, In the money, as the main colour of the design:
Then, we're gonna map where the leaves and top olive will be. They're not the most prominent part of the design, so you can go with one of two routes: either painting sloppily the lunula area with the other olive and then paint on top the leaves, or paint the leaves and then cleaning up the top with the olive. I would personally recommend the second one, but I went with the former:
I made more sure that the bottom part was done properly, including the little stem Smoliv has dripping onto its face, and went a bit looser on the top, as I knew I was going to paint the other tone after leaving it for a bit to dry and not transfer:
This already reads like the shape it should have, contained in the borders of a nail. Now, we should paint the face. Smoliv's face is really simple. It only has two round black eyes with white smaller dots in the middle. The mouth is also quite simple, as is a zigzag line. I personally used a dotting tool for these steps, making sure my center point in my mouth was in the center and then going to one side first, then the other:
Leave time to dry, or else, the white is not gonna apply as smoothly and will mess up the bottom layer, it kind of happened to me:
And always remember: let ample time for nail art like this, specially implying dots of polish like the eyes and shades like black, to dry before applying top coat, unless you're into smearing all your effort!
The second example I will show you is Rowlet, that adorable owl that's Alola's starter. I figured I needed a big recognisable one to drive my point home, so I made it holographic, too. I used:
I don't have a full on beige, but this shade is close enough so I can trick your eyes with relative colours to make it look more brown than it is:
Holo Taco's Fifty Shades of Greige
Holo Taco's Featured Guest
Holo Taco's Green Taffy
Holo Taco's Electrostatic
Please don't comment on the situation of my Green Taffy's bottle. I know. I have a back up. I want to use all this polish even though probably I messed up the formula already, as I have thinned it out a couple of times when it was gloopy and now it's less opaque and holographic. Oops. Also related but unrelated, Cristine, I understand if you don't want to bring back Full Charge, but please send me one or two bottles, my Full Charge is in a similar situation and I love that polish to death, thanks.
Back to the nail art, I've started with Fifty Shades of Greige as my base:
Now, I will paint the white parts to outline the shapes. Rowlet has a white bottom, a bit staggered, playing around with the brown feathers that are on top. It also has two big circles touching each other, I don't know how else to describe it aside from Venn diagram:
I didn't mind too much the scallops at the bottom not being symmetrical, as my next step is using my green to do the leaf bowtie. I mark my center point and then a line to one side, which I round on top and bottom. Repeat the same step for the other side!
Now it's time to focus on its face, the body is already in good shape: For the eyes, they're almost the same as Smoliv's but more elyptical, so I just will proceed the same but dragging my tool a bit. The beak is half white, half orange, so I'll use brown too because I don't have orange. I place just a dot in the lower part:
And the last step is to add the white to the eyes, and a small line on top of that beak, with a super small dot on top to mimic Rowlet's shape. It's very fine detailing, and I am not good at it, nor have the best brushes for it, so it's not perfect, but it's enough.
I think that you can tell what the vibe is by just looking at it. I didn't top coat it for this photos, so it's not showing the whole properties of holo, and it's showing a bit of the layers, but again, wait for a bit or your Rowlet will be sad.
The last tutorial is for a pokémon that if it has no fanbase, that means I'm dead. Because I'm its only fan. Cradily!
As a treat to myself, and because I also lack yellows in my collection, I decided to do it in full on frosted metals, so this is not the most accessible look, as all three polishes are discontinued and were limited edition or seasonal, anyways:
Holo Taco's Foiled Again
Holo Taco's Blacklisted
Holo Taco's Frozen Benanas
You may notice that my Frozen Benanas is tarnished, and it's not a light, cool toned yellow anymore. It paints the same, but the shade right now it's more of a true gold, leaning more into the antique. I'm absolutely NOT mad about it. My Foiled Again may also be starting the process, as I can see the flakes on top being way more turquoise and the liquid getting into a mossy green territory instead of a forest green? But I am not sure. I love the formula, but it's not the best at colour accuracy, honestly.
I start with the green as the base:
I will only recreate the face, so no tentacles, no body, so I basically divide my nail to accomodate for the slit where the eyes reside and the markings on the head. That's why I place my black stripe in the lower half of the nail, to accomodate for that. I'm making it a bit curved, and thick enough to accomodate the yellow dots making the eyes:
The eyes will go on each side after leaving it time to dry for a bit. For the markings on top, it's two circles on each side, and then a stripe that's concentrical to them. I made my best to not make them touch but due to the size of the nail, I didn't fully accomplish that. It least, it conveys the point across:
With these three examples I am trying to teach you how to make any cartoon creature by just following these two principles: simplify the shapes to something achievable, and layer things in the way that's easier for you to draw. Also don't worry too much about the perfect shades, just make them close enough, and have fun! These nails were done on stream, alongside another one that was requested by chat, so if you want to get more footage on how to, with maybe more snippets of knowledge, the VOD is on my youtube channel:
Thanks for reading this, and if you have any kind of suggestion, please do let me know! I will probably post something simpler next week to give myself some grace!
Today's tutorial will cover a technique that I am shocked I didn't cover earlier. In my roadmap, this one was definitely early on in the journey, but several different nail arts got in the way and, oh well, it's a great opportunity like any other. I will teach you how do I make marbles with regular nail polish and just a simple flat brush.
This technique is quite easy but can become quite bulky if you do it over all the nail. My inspiration this time was malachite, as its palette speaks to me personally, using polishes that are close together in hue, but this technique is highly customizable and you can put together your favourite polishes and get quite different results. My choices for this tutorial were:
You truly don't need expensive polishes for this technique to work well, as honestly you put them on a bit thick. These five polishes combined would have been around 10€ in total, you can even see the 2€ sticker on the first one!
PS... Precious Jewels in Emerald
Misdei's #203
Misdei's #201
Deliplus Gel effect's Nº963
Deliplus Gel effect's Nº107
I chose these five because they're cool toned greens, two crèmes and two different kind of shiny polishes. Emerald is a more fine shimmer, while Nº963 has a prominent silver flake that adds a special visual texture. Nº107 also has a very subtle shimmer, but it barely translates onto the nail. You can choose several different polishes in more contrasting colours but similar or the same formula for a different effect, too! I started with one coat of Emerald, to have a base on in case I miss a spot. Didn't go for full opacity as it just is not necessary, but if you're planning to not do this technique on the whole nail, I'd recommend building it up:
You will need a place to use as a palette. I personally use a yoghourt lid, as I just like eating these yoghourts so I can save several. I also only use a new, clean one if I need to do a tutorial, so my yoghourt lids can be used for months, using a little at a time and then using the other side. Is cleaning them possible? Yes. Is it worth to me? Personally... no. The acetone I'd use is more expensive than recycling the lids and using a new one. Place all your shades together on it, something like this:
You want to be able to pick them up scooping with your flat brush without mixing them up together too much. That's very important to get the effect. Place that fresh polish on top of the nail, wiggling to your liking to reveal the effect. The polish will be placed in an opaque way, but with an uneven surface. Refill your brush as needed, grabbing more of the polishes you'd like in those spots. If you work quickly, you'd be able to make the different passes blend together without making a harsh and noticeable line. My final result was this:
I'd recommend waiting for at least 10 to 15 minutes to let the polish set properly, as the layer is quite significant and can be really mushy before. You can do slight retouches in areas you don't like with more polish, but try to avoid piling up too much nail polish, as it will be very difficult to maneuver over the nail before it setting. After that, apply your top coat of choice, floating it to avoid smearing the polishes. Even after that time, the manicure can smear significantly. This technique is quite simple and effective, but has a learning curve to gauge the placement of the polishes and the thickness of the coat, so don't get discouraged and keep trying! The beauty is that every attempt, even with the same polishes, will be a different result!
Next week it will be our 20th tutorial and I have a big surprise for you, so please wait for it as I'm very excited to present you a bigger and better! If you follow me on Twitch you have a very good idea of what's to come!
Time for a new entry on what was on my nails and I will say that... it wasn't that much at all! This month I only did three manis, so we're not going to have much discussion about them!
On April 7th I decided to try out Holo Taco's Ride or Diamond, because, I mean, it was April's gemstone and I wanted some fun. But it had no green, so... I added some to it!
That green? Literal highlighter. I painted on top of the polish with green highlighter, top coat and called it a day. I love the effect and the french tip that I created like it. It is not the cleanest technique, and black light shows up all the mistakes, but if you don't look, you don't know.
Sadly, this manicure chipped very quickly, and I had an event to attend to, so I needed a new manicure by April 11th:
You may recognize them from my Penitent in the Night tutorial, as I did them on my actual nails. I had plans to do them, as I say in that post, due to a national holiday. It ended already and I didn't partake in it, by the way! But wearing it on my nails was quite fun!
Then I wore these nails for almost two weeks, I didn't plan to wear them for this long, specially matte! But I scheduled a nail stream on my twitch channel for the 24th and I just didn't feel like doing a placeholder manicure for 3 days, so I stuck with them. The theme? Chat chooses every step.
I ended up with Holo Taco's Wicked Potion magnetized horizontally and half of the nail painted with Holo Taco's Celestial Lights. I ended up liking the manicure a lot, to be this random!
I honestly think that this half and half can look really pretty, it's just that these two polishes didn't have enough contrast to shine! I also don't fully love that the vibe is similar to the previous one, dark and cool toned, but beggars can't be choosers.
I feel a bit guilty thinking "I want to do more manicures!" because if I still like the manicure and looks good, it should not be a problem to extend them, and that way I save polish! So I will not promise anything, but I will attempt to make more varied manis this month, at least!
Today's tutorial will be about a style of nails that I haven't done in this series, which would be simple detailing over a plain background. I've also included a matching half and half nail moment so we can get certain visual texture and interest. This is what I painted:
We can jump straight to review what I used for this look:
I've used an olive green with gold shimmer as the base, because I just love that polish even if being almost 15 years old at this point, but you can use whichever colours you choose. And no, I'm not showing twice the same bottle:
Kiko Sun Pearl in 427
Holo Taco's One Coat Black
Holo Taco's Black Flake Taco
You will also need, as I said, a brush. I recommend the thinnest you can possible get and feel comfortable with. Of course, to paint details over a colour, you need the to make that colour opaque:
The next step is drawing the silhouettes you want. I wanted to make stems with leaves moved by the wind, though my lines were a bit shakier than usual. For the leaves I play a bit with my pressure. I apply more pressure in the center then lift up the brush for the tip. Make sure your brush is saturated with polish before applying to avoid streaks, too! Do as I say, not as I do!
Once you're happy, or just feel you can't improve it in any way, it's time to give it the extra touch. Get your topper and apply a coat to half the nail, the half you haven't painted. Or you can use this to camouflage your shakier lines, too, if you want!
I think this effect works best if the flakes and the lines are in the same colour, as it gives a continuity to the whole design. So you know the drill, it's time to ask your favourite nail polish companies to release flakes in the colours you like most and play around with this! Of course, after this you should apply a top coat, and if you prefer, this looks amazing in matte too.
I am a bit disappointed the golden shimmer is not apparent in photos, I can tell you that in real life it is noticeable, even if subdued. You can also use a crème for the effect but I'd recommend that the base is not very busy and contrasts enough with your flake combo.
I know it's another short tutorial, but I'm working in a special nail art tutorial post thanks to my stream's incentives, so make sure to follow me on there too, as I also do nail art live!
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)