I just realised it's June, which means that we can get a little bit quirky doing flags on our nails. I decided to go with a lesser represented flag for one very particular reason: It's green, white, grey and black, the only colours of nail polish I have. But this technique is perfectly suitable for basically any striped flag your queer or allied heart desires!
We're going to learn how to make decals today to get perfect stripes, or as perfect as you can cut them. Let's review the polishes I've used:
I used shades in my Holo Taco drawer that resembled the aromantic flag, which would be:
- Holo Taco's Green Screen
- Holo Taco's Here for the Payday
- Holo Taco's Not Milky White
- Holo Taco's Foreshadow
- Holo Taco's One Coat Black
I totally admit that Duct Tape Gray would be a better option than Foreshadow, that leans too warm, but guess what, I don't have it and I feel wasteful to buy a polish that I'll probably just use once!
Explanations aside, you will need a surface to paint on and peel off nail polish. I recommend using a flexible one, like a silicon mat or a plastic sealable bag. Flexibility is key to give you more wiggle room and ease working with this. Tweezers, manicure scissors and a clean up brush will be crucial too.
First off, let's look at your flag: you want to see how many stripes does it have to know which ones will become decals and which ones won't. For a five stripes flag, like this or the trans flag, I'd recommend doing two decals. Seven stripes flags, like the lesbian or gay man one, would get three decals. Three stripes, like bisexual or pansexual, will only need one! And for even numbers... trust your gut to know if you want to work on a decal in your cuticle area or free edge.
You want to paint the stripes you're going to turn into decals onto your surface. Paint them opaque and slightly on the thicker side, but don't exaggerate. You want them to be solid pieces when you peel them, but workable:
Those stripes are approximately the width of the brush of the bottles, as a reference. I placed the nail by it to ensure I wasn't getting too thin, but those were more than enough. Let these dry for around half an hour to an hour and try to peel them carefully by just twisting the material below carefully and seeing if a lip forms. That's your cue for the tweezers.
In the meantime, you can paint the other stripes of your nail, without too much care about a perfect line. Just be careful not to cross contaminate your polishes:
As you can see, my lines aren't straight at all, like me. It's fine, we're gonna cover them with the decals and that's the whole point.
When your decals are ready and peeled off, the next step is cutting stripes to size. Don't worry about the sidewalls, we're working on that later, the extra lips will give you wiggle room to place them for real. The polishes in my case were dried enough so I could place them on top without worrying about sticking them together to check the sizes and see if I needed to cut more. Don't apply pressure, as the soft material might want to do so anyways, but this is what I went for:
I'm happy with this, so I remove those stripes, apply a little amount of a sticky base coat to ensure adhesion and then place the stripes for real in their correct places. Sadly, that base coat I decided to use made my polishes wet again and they smudged in one side of the nail before me realising, so that's why I had to rush the job a bit and then play catch up. I'd recommend applying it with a drier brush and a very light touch. You don't need a full coat, you want the product there to just make the adhesion happen. Afterwards, you're going to cut those extra lips, either with scissors or, for safety, with an orange woodstick around your sidewalls and cuticle if applicable. This will leave a slightly jagged edge that you can take care of with a bit of acetone in your clean up brush. This will melt your polish and merge it with the layers that were applied from the bottle, while respecting the edge from the decal.
For full transparency, I skipped this clean up step as my tip is plastic and I don't want to risk melting of the plastic as an element to take into account. Also, being a tip, I could cut more precisely, because it doesn't have sidewalls.
You can notice the different layers, as the decals will be slightly raised, that's why you shouldn't do them too thick, but that's nothing a good top coat can't take care of. If it still annoys you to no end, you can double up on your top coat, or if you predict it will annoy you anyways, put a topper before the top coat to get that smoothing effect!
I have nothing else to say apart from wishing you the happiest of Prides in spite of what's going on around in the world, be safe but be unapologetically you. There are more ways to achieve a look like this, like straight nail vinyls or striping tape, but I thought this would be a great moment to introduce decals and cutting them in a straight line is the simplest thing you can do with them. Or is it? Next week probably we'll go for summer nail art. For real this time.
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