What I wore on January 2025?

 Today we're having a more relaxed post, as I won't be basically teaching anything but just showing what I was wearing on my nails during this month of January. I will not make a full on tutorial on any of the looks but I will share glimpses of the process behind the nails. Don't hesitate on telling me if you like one of these looks enough to make a full on tutorial, it would be extremely helpful as I'm not the best with coming up with ideas!

First off, this is a bit of cheating but I will count the nails I started the year with, even if I painted these last year:

 The manicure is simple layering of several different shiny effects. I like passing years with the shiniest and sparkliest nails possible, and this year I decided to layer over Holo Taco's retired Everything is Pine, a green holographic glitter. I sealed this polish with a top coat to help create a slightly smoother surface, as glitter tends to suck up top coat, so I didn't want my toppers to be the ones suffering this.

Over it, I have put Holo Taco's Everything Taco, to cover myself with iridescent flakes and more holographic. I also wanted a bit of shimmer, for those low lit situations, so I added a bit of Holo Taco's Celestial Lights on top. And it's not shiny enough if it's not reflective, so I layered Holo Taco's Reflective Taco. And sealed this monstrosity again with another layer of top coat.

 On January 11th, I decided it was time for a change and I was kinda obsessing over Alien Infatuation by Holo Taco, so I tried to make some nail art with it:

I wanted to keep it in that grey tone, so I played with matte versus shiny. Over Holo Taco's Alien Infatuation I applied a matte top coat, and freehanded details with Holo Taco's World's First, as I wanted to make the two greys clash with the sheen. I honestly don't even know how that style of nail art is even called, those swirls across the nail in chrome, specially on lighter colours. It's something I see quite a bunch and it was my time to attempt it for the first time. And honestly, I liked it but it felt like it's not my usual style.

I got some rhinestones these holidays, too, and these particular ones were quite close in tone to the shimmer in Alien Infatuation. You might not notice, but I would love to have a shimmer or a flake like this polish has in it. Yes, I have green shimmer and flakies, but those are a more pure green, even leaning on cool toned. This shimmer is warmer, and that's basically the reason I wanted to play around with it now. I know, I'm quite specific with my polishes sometimes.

Rhinestones are not usually my thing, as they usually fall off in some days, and that bothers me, so that's why I changed it on January 18. I was feeling very adventurous, I had an incentive of trying watermarbling... so I went for it. Honestly, I am impressed with the results. It... worked!

 

 

 

Please don't pay attention to the photo with flash, it honestly threw off the tone so much that I don't even know what to do. Of course, I didn't have much of a plan, nor a technique nailed down, but it worked. And I have this stream saved in my computer. If I upload it in a place it won't get deleted, I will make sure to link it here!

 

I also used Holo Taco for this manicure, in particular Not Milky White, Here for the Payday and Green Screen. I'm so sad about those two crèmes, they're amazing and look amazing together, as you can see. I decided to top it off with Holo Taco's Linear Holo Taco, to maybe hide some imperfections? And add a little bit of a sparkle. It worked for the latter, if you could not tell, and I'm not even mad about it!

 

I'm writing this post slightly in advance, so I can tell you that at the time of this post getting uploaded, those nails are not on me anymore. I was too proud of them so I had to keep them for almost two weeks, please understand! But they're chipping hard and it's time to move on. Maybe I'll watermarble in the close future, it was fun!

 

Thanks for reading and letting me share my manicures this month! I wanted to improve my nail art game and honestly so good so far, I'm experimenting with new techniques to me and combinations I usually don't go for. I don't want to put too much pressure on myself to top myself every single manicure but honestly, I don't really know how I will make it in February. I hope to share it with you then!

The art of self-plagiarism

As a pixel artist, I struggle sometimes with making things consistent between several pieces. I love experimenting with different size of canvases, palettes and the likes, but sometimes a project requires you to keep certain rules consistent because you need every piece to look like it belongs with the rest. That was the case for me, planning to create different potions for my twitch banners. For that purpose, I’ve done a seventh piece that’s not used by any panel, exclusive for this post (until I have a need for it!):

The style of banners that I was aiming for was like this. I could have designed one flask and change its color or even nothing at all, but… I like to overcomplicate myself:

 

I will admit, I started that flask in the banner with no plan, just dots, lines, vibes. I added as many details as I thought relevant and just had fun with it. But I decided that I would need to keep some sort of consistency for other pieces.

And that’s when I basically started doing the rest in the same way.

I started copying and pasting my neck of the bottle, because I wanted that to be consistent in all the pieces. I also wanted all of them to have the same height and width, and to be symmetrical. So guidelines for those proportions were really useful. I used other layer for these guidelines, which is extremely useful for revisiting this project back. Believe me, I thanked my past me for saving me this tedious work.

Most of the times, I don’t even know which kind of shape I’m doing. I just make my line and let the shape inform me. I’m not trying to make them look like a potion for a specific purpose, so if it looks nice, it goes. I work on one side. The symmetry condition is perfect for this, so I don’t have to worry about half of the image. Working smarter, not harder!

Next up, I add structural elements, in this case, the columns and the holes in the middle. I still use the guidelines to ensure they’re also symmetrical, but at this stage, I don’t care about shading. I also go with a general shape of the lower part of the bottle. In this case, I decided to make it quite narrow, so I don’t expect this particular flask to stand on its own. But this is fantasy, anyways!

Next step is basically rendering the bottom, which is empty. I kept it symmetrical, which is just a choice as any other because it makes no sense. This piece doesn’t have a cohesive light source, I know that, but I roll with it, and if I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t be the wiser. Sometimes, simplifications comes to this: just roll with stuff and let the end result be pretty anyways.

I also started deciding where the liquid would be, understanding that the glass has a certain thickness, and even when refraction and reflection makes it look like it’s full, you can see some spots apparently empty. Specially at the bottom and around sharp shapes.

Then, I start shading the glass around with… basically not much order. I tend to put my light source in the top left of the picture instinctively, so I tend to go harder on the shados in the opposite side, but I also don’t leave so many places with a long string of the same shade of the glass to give it variation and the feel that the liquid interacts with it.

And yes. Bucket of paint tool for the interior. That’s me, I won’t deny it. From here on, we only have to render the liquid to make it look a bit more… liquid!

It’s quite self-descriptive. I added big blobs of white and the light shade to represent light spots and the darker shade to make shadows on the liquid. I love adding random blobs in the bottom to represent all the light sources bouncing around on the whole glass and creating shadows down there. I also include shines in big spots and close to the edge but not touching it explicitly. Shadows go in the opposite sides and help round (hah, geddit) the harmony and shape.

I also add the dark shade to the top, to signify the level of the liquid. You noticed I left a bit of extra height to the sides of that, that’s how several liquids act. Explaining why and how is way out of the scope of this post (but it’s surface tension, it’s always surface tension) so I encourage you to look for references. Which is something I’m not stressing enough, even when my depiction is really simplified, it’s informed by references and knowledge of how items interact. That will help the eye that looks past one second to your piece.

My final step here is to add bubbles. I tend to go with 4x4 squares without the corners to represent circles, and 3x3 squares on its diagonal. But also, I love breaking this shape, filling parts in, that would give it a bit of movement to the light and bubbles. It just helps break the space and give it a bit more of interest, for me.

So that’s the process for this particular set. Of course, you can go in whichever order and with whichever restrictions you want or need. I haven’t mentioned the colour palette, for example, which is something that I also keep consistent for branding purposes.

Not every series of art pieces is the same, not everyone will need the same treatment, but you should establish some guidelines of what you want to keep consistent, what you need to change and how to make your process go well for you. I started experimenting doing the first piece and it took close to three hours. Now, with the process streamlined, that potion of the tutorial took one hour. Including taking pictures of the process!

 

I don’t really have more insight than this, I am quite a novice at this size of canvas and to be honest, I’m experimenting more lately than ever in pixela rt, so my input might not be the professional help you require. At least I hope you took something you can apply to your own process in any kind and not be afraid of just messing around and having fun: you might discover something you really like to do!

Waterfall nails tutorial

 Today's tutorial will focus on create one of the easiest freehand designs, the so called in the community "waterfall" nail art:

This look is, basically, several parallel lines of different lengths and shades of nail polish coming from the same end of the nail. The traditional one would come from the cuticle line, but per the shape of my swatch sticks, I had way more free real estate on the tip so that's why I used them. Which polishes did I use for this look?

You really only need to decide your base colour and the polishes you're gonna do the waterfall effect with, in my case those were:

• Pull & Bear Green Backwoods
• Pull & Bear Golf Green
• Pull & Bear Green Flare
• Pull & Bear Galactic Green
• Pull & Bear Today is Vibrant

You will need a thin brush too. It's your choice if you'd rather have a short brush or a striping brush. I personally prefer the longer bristles because it helps a bit with the linework. This particular nail art is perfect as practice because even if your nails aren't perfectly straight or consistent, the accumulation of them will convey the point anyways.

So, to begin with, paint your base colour. I used Today is Vibrant, a black shimmery polish. I'd recommend a colour that would make the other colours easy to layer on top. This might depend more on the opacity of the other polishes than the base colour:

For the technique, just drop a little amount of polish on your palette. I personally use a yoghourt plastic lid, if you're interested. If you have a silicon mat, you can also use that, as it will be easy to clean after. Then, saturate your brush with that polish and just draw some lines, in different lengths:
 

I acknowledge that this particular green doesn't pop out on the black canvas that well aside from the sheen, which is why I would recommend a lighter colour for your base. I was feeling rebelious and honestly wanted to play with different finishes. This is an amazing technique to just put together polishes that look wildly different.

Continue with the other colours that you want to put in this look, trying to fill up the line you have decided to make your waterfall, either the cuticle or the free edge:

 At this point, don't hesitate to go back and forth to colours that you think don't show up as much or areas that you feel lack just a line of a specific shade to feel complete. It's your nail and you're the master of this design.

Wait for a bit before applying your top coat, as you don't want to smear and blur these lines or contaminate the brush of your top coat. Specially if there are lines that are too close, the thickness will make it dry a bit slower than if used as normally directed. That thickness, on the other hand, won't be an issue after the seal of the top coat, if you're concerned by that.

And that would be it! I think this technique is perfect to practice, as you can see some of my nails are far from perfect and it's still not something that bothers me. Think that dripping liquid is imperfect in the path it takes! I hope you give it a try with your favourite nail polishes and tell me how it went!

Vinyl fish pond nails tutorial

We are still learning the basics of nail art, and one of the tools that I haven’t talked about is nail vinyls. They’re basically a stencil that you place on a dry nail to paint over them and then remove, exposing the image on the nail with ease. That way, you can have nail arts like these fishes on your nail without freehanding:

You can find them in two different ways: complete nail vinyls and just shapes and guides. The former are less versatile, as they are meant to go over the entire nail, defining the design with little more to do than positioning. The latter, on the other hand, through their positioning allow more design varieties, usually. Both work functionally the same, so let’s see how. The materials we’re going to use today are:

The polishes I’m using are:

• Holo Taco Lite Link
• Holo Taco Missed Shift

And the nail vinyl is from a cheap package from Amazon, they come in a big chunk with several designs. To be honest, these fishes were not something I was excited to use on my actual nails and only two of them were available, so I used one of them in a previous test, and this one for the purposes of this tutorial.

But what do you want to do to use these nail vinyls? Well, let’s start with our canvas. You need to have your background as you please, I just make Lite Link reach opacity:

This is very very important: you must ensure your polish is fully dry for the next steps to work properly. I used a quick dry top coat to make certain of that. Save yourself headaches, seal your base with a good top coat.

Peel the vinyl you want to use and place it on the nail in the spot you want. You may use a tool for this step, I used flat tweezers to help me. Also bending the backing of the vinyl to get a corner going was my way to go, if that helps you.

Another thing you may want to do, I did it, is using scissors to create small incisions close to the center of the sides of the vinyls. Why so? It helps it to accomodate to the curve of the nail!

After this picture, I gave a second press to the vinyl, as it got away from the bottom left corner, as you can see. Do not let that happen, you want your vinyl to be tight-fitted, as that will create the seal between the areas you don’t want paint on and the areas you do!

When you have it perfectly stuck, just get your second colour and… paint it! Try to make an even, opaque coat, but don’t make the polish coat too thick. And when it’s painted, don’t hesitate: peel it off. I recommend tweezers to avoid messing up your fingers.

I had to clean a little bit a couple of shapes because I applied my polish a little bit too thick, to avoid transparency issues from the multichrome. Do not worry, work quick and with as little acetone as possible (or none at all), clean with your preferred brush. The top coat that you sure used to protect your base colour would help a lot to make sure you don’t accidentally mess it up, just don’t use much remover or pressure and you’ll be fine.

Wait until you seal this with another coat of top coat, or you’ll risk smudging your results. And float it, always float your top coats when dealing with any kind of nail art, or just in general, honestly, to avoid transfering your polish to your top coat brush.

And this is it. We might go through different techniques and designs that use nail vinyls in different ways in the future, but I’m focusing on the basics right now to really be on the same page in more complex designs. I think I could kind of figure out my camera a little bit better, even if shimmers get a bit overexposed and blurry, so that’s an improvement!

I hope you enjoyed this description and I will see you next week! I don’t really know if we will do another “basic technique” or we’ll go a little bit more crazy, if you have any suggestions please don’t hesitate to let me know and thanks for reading!

Dotted chain nails tutorial

Today, we’re going to work with another of those “essential” nail art tools that every single influencer will tell you to have: dotting tools. They are quite a versatile tool to create a wide array of designs. Overlap dots, make concentrical dots, even flick your dots! But what we’re doing today is just learning how to properly make the dots and troubleshoot.

 

Let’s see the materials I’ve used to make this nail:

 

The three polishes are from my local european equivalent of a dollar store, so I won’t expect any of you to even have them, but I’ll list them anyways:

• Misdei #352
• Misdei #203
• Misdei #201

And the tool from today is that specific dotting tool. It came in a cheap pack of five, with new nail art brushes from certain website of Chinese goods. I’m not promoting them, but I will encourage you to try less expensive options to get your hands dirty… or your nails pretty.

Most dotting tools are double sided, because it saves material and you only have to flip them to get another side. They are usually a plastic making the handle with two metal pieces on the extremes, ending in a ball. You dip them into wet nail polish and lightly dab it onto the surface you want a dot on. And that’s it! They’re very simple tools!

Let’s look at our nail and go step by step:

You will want your base coat to look opaque and mostly dry. It took two coats for me, in this particular instance. Then, let’s work on our first row of dots.

You need the dotting tool and a surface to drop a small amount of nail polish. You can use a silicon mat, or a yoghourt lid. I personally work on top of a silicon mat but I don’t purposefully drop dots of polish on it, I just don’t like paying attention at drying time to put away my mat and not mess up anything else. A lid, I can put it away more easily.

Put a bit of polish on your surface, then, dip the dotting tool to that little pool, and put the dot where you want! I personally started placing the dot closer to the nail tip and worked my way through the base area. I’d recommend dipping back again your tool in the polish every dot for consistency, and work fast. If you notice any kind of resistence in the polish, or any string… time to get more fresh polish from the bottle. You’ll thank me later, believe me.

The same procedure was executed for the second colour of dots. I just used a small tool. Be mindful that I did a mistake, and specifically one dot is slightly larger and it’s touching a big one. Creating a perfect result is quite challenging so don’t feel bad if something goes slightly off like it happened here. As the number of dots increase, the number of chances of mistakes also go up!

A couple of extra important notes: to clean your dotting tool, you just have to use your regular nail polish remover and your regular cotton pad or ball of preference. It’s that simple!

And for your top coat: wait. Patience is key. The dots have some volume so it will take some minutes to dry and pushing them with the top coat will smudge them. Positively. So wait for a while before applying your top coat and even then float it, don’t press with your brush.

That would be the end for today! I’m going through basic techniques so we can have an understanding for future tutorials, so in the future we might go through more interesting dotticures without having to explain the basics. The bad part about this approach is that I’m still figuring out the light and photos, so it is not the best quality. In any case, thanks for reading and I’m open to suggestions!

Gradient nails tutorial

 

In this post I will be explaining how to reach a gradiented look between polishes on a nail. Fading between different polishes has its tips and tricks, and we’re going to go over them today, as it’s a pillar in several nail art looks.

The only things that we’re gonna need are as follows:

 

Today I used three linear holos by Holo Taco:

• Holo Taco’s Mint Mojito
• Holo Taco’s Green Taffy
• Holo Taco’s Lost in the Woods

And the magic secret, a dense make up sponge. Make sure it’s dense enough so it won’t transfer itself to the nail you’re doing the gradient on!

You can use as many or as few shades as you want on your gradient, but I’d recommend for beginners to stick to 2 to 3 shades at most. I'll also note that polishes in the same formula work way better together, so if you’re having issues, it might be the formulas you’re mixing. Aside from that, it doesn’t matter the colour combination you’re using, it doesn’t have to be the same family of colours, but it’s me, I only own green polishes, so it has to be green!

Let’s begin working on our nail:

 

There is much consideration about the state you should start your gradient with, and arguments towards all of them.

You could start your gradient with no base colour (but yes a base coat!), as it will bring an unadulterated colour on the nail, but this can lead to opacity issues and requiring too many coats.

There’s also the argument towards using the lightest, and/or least opaque, shade in the gradient, as I have applied. I find this approach good enough for me specially because I usually work in a similar hue, but be warned, this can affect the result on top. A light dab of blue over a yellow base can lead to your blue needing an extra coat to avoid making it look teal!

So for this reason, other nail artists prefer to put a coat of white crème below, as it will have a surface that will make any colour pop on top and hide the nail line, if it’s a concern of yours. It works better if you’re doing a gradient between different hues so you keep those shades differentiated.

But in all honesty, these are the “basic” approaches. Hey, if you want to gradient those iridescent shimmery polishes over black, I’m NOT complaining. In fact, with experience, I encourage experimentation with layering shades to give a new use and look to old favourites of yours!

But enough about which kind of underpainting your gradient should or not have, how do we make pretty colours appear in our nail with a sponge?

You might want to protect your surrounding skin with liquid latex or a similar product to ease the clean up process before proceeding!

Instead of painting directly on the nail, we paint on the sponge stripes of the shades you want on your nail, and work quickly! Dab it onto the nail, lightly but firmly, several times. Move your sponge side to side while you’re dabbing to ensure your sidewalls are covered. Moving it very slightly up and down might help blending the shades better but be mindful of it or else you can mix the polishes too much. For this reason I personally find easier to overlap the polishes on the sponge directly to reach that perfectly blended look.

Depending on the opacity of your polishes, you will probably need two to four coats of this sponging. Paint a bit more of polish on the sponge between each layer, but not too much so it’s dripping wet. You want to see a sheen but not liquid on top of it, the goal is to release the polish on the surface of the sponge onto your nail and blobs of paint will defeat the purpose and make a mess. It is advised to let the nail dry for thirty seconds to a minute between coats of sponging, you can use this time to paint on the sponge again so you don’t really have much downtime with this technique, perfect for impatient nail artists!

And after two layers in my case, I achieved my final look! Don’t be discouraged if you need more layers (I used quite opaque nail polishes, but I can tell you that they will take more layers than applied normally) or the look doesn’t work great. It’s a technique that requires practice to master, and I’m not close to that level, as I cannot reach perfect results with more challenging situations and polishes!

Don’t worry if your surface looks a bit uneven, that’s the result of using the sponge. Apply your top coat carefully to give the polishes a last chance to blend together and you’ll have a perfect surface and result.

Thank you for reading, I hope you give this a try, as it’s really fun to do when you get the gist of it and the results are always striking.

Camouflage nails tutorial

 

In this post I will explain how to make your nails invisible! Or, well, as invisible as camo gets. The process is super easy and quick and basically requires no skill or talent to achieve.

The technique is called “smooshy marble” and it’s one of the many ways you can get a look with several colours touching each other in erratic ways but still distinct.

I don’t want to make a lengthy introduction so you can get directly to the topic, so for this design you will need the following:

 

I used a beige, an olive green and an army green nail polish:

• Mixture made by myself that got tarnished and I desperately wanted to get rid of
• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Wild Life Nº406
• Wild & Young (previously known as Pinkduck) Major Collection Nº336

Of course, you don’t need the exact same polishes I used, that would be a fool’s errand. This technique is quite versatile and works with basically any combination of colours, I just like these together.

The last tool, and the magic for this, is a stamper. Mine is a cheap one that I got on AliExpress years ago, and honestly, it’s slightly damaged now, but it still works for this technique. Mine is a clear one, but that is not needed. You can use whichever you have available to you or prefer.

After your base coat, you may apply one of the colours of the marble. I’d suggest the lightest one, or the one with the least opacity in your design. In my case, it is the beige mixture:

 

Do not worry about making the coat perfect. This is not a necessary step, but I encourage you to take the extra step for a couple of reasons: first, it will help build up a polish that might not be the most opaque but you want in your design, and second, it will hide your natural nail if you miss a spot on your nail in the following steps!

Then, you will grab the stamper and all the polishes, and you’re gonna place dots of the shades on the stamper head, like this:

 

I will admit that there’s not enough of the beige shade, and this is not intentional. I just didn’t have enough polish in the bottle to drop more. You can change the result altering the proportions and distribution of the polishes on your stamper.

And now, work quickly, and stamp it on your nails! You can stamp sections still on the stamper on barren places on the nail or just if you don’t like how a section turned out! You’ll end up with something like this:

 

Be warned that this technique most likely will get on your skin, but it’s quite easy to remove from it. Also, you can tell the texture on my swatch stick, due to sections where I stamped again and readjusted. That’s totally normal and will be dealt with by adding your top coat. Which… is your last step!

 

For this particular colour scheme and concept, I decided to go with a matte top coat, so you can see the result! Make sure to wait some minutes before applying and float it to avoid smudging your design and transfering it to the brush.

And that’s it! As I said, very fast and easy to do!

I have done this nail art before on my natural nails, so I dug up a couple of pictures of it. Believe it or not, these are the same polishes *and* camera! For some reason, today’s pictures got really dark for no particular reason. I used the same polishes but the beige started as more of a green shade. And my hand is better lit.