School Blackboard nails tutorial

It's back to school season so I thought it would be an appropiate time to show you something green that's part of my childhood. I don't know if these are normal nowadays, as apparently we have shifted towards more whiteboard oriented education centers, at least my uni had all whiteboards with markers, but in school and high school we had these dark green blackboards in which we scribbled with chalk!

Achieving this look is surprisingly easy and I can give you a fun trick at the end! But first, let's review which products I used:

This blackboard effect is all about crèmes but you can customize your blackboard however you want with a more textured look for the wall or a metallic polish for the rim of the blackboard:

• Holo Taco's Head Hunter
• Holo Taco's Brownie Points
• Holo Taco's Magical Mustache
• Holo Taco's Not Milky White

 Feel free to replace at will, but you do want a dark green polish and build it to opacity:

Then, it's time to paint a straight line french with your "wall" colour. Mine is a dark brown but feel free to put something lighter or a visually busy polish to emulate stone walls, whatever reminds you of your childhood or speaks to your personal palette. Don't worry about it being perfect, we're gonna refine it with the next step altogether. I didn't use any nail art tools for this, straight out of the bottle:

Next step will be creating the border of the blackboard, where the chalk rests. And this is the step in which we're going to clean that line. Use a striping brush to create a line between these two shades. It's that simple as a concept:

Pro tip, don't let a hair from your dog enter that line. It will be cleaner. Anyways, this is basically your base and the whole effect. To drive the point home, I used my white to create a small piece of chalk resting over the border and I painted a molecule! Extra points if you know which one it is! But nobody is an organic chemist like me, anyways:

 Okay, I'll give you the answer: It's menthol! Why menthol? Because I'm drinking a lot of chocolate mint black tea lately and it's a small and simple enough molecule to allow me to draw it with my lack of fine line skills. Seal your manicure with a top coat, and then make it matte. Trust me.

I skipped the quick dry top coat here so my surface is not perfectly smooth. I did it because it's a swatch stick, honestly, simple as that. It's not attached to skin so oil won't build up and won't be used for things in life like your real hands will be, so it won't dent.

The fun fact that I teased earlier is that when this matte top coat is dry... you CAN paint over it with gel pens to make it full on back to school nails! You can make similar nails with a white background and use all your glitter and neon gel pens as your heart desires! But in this blog, it has to be green. Would you be interested in another tutorial seeing the same effect with different colours? Let me know and thanks for reading!