HPB Presents May Flowers

Starting the week with something new: a blog link-up challenge. Seems like in five years doing this, I would have done one before, but no, just getting to it now, under the banner of the Hobby Polish Bloggers group on Facebook. The mani theme for this month's event is flowers, which opened up so many possibilities. I pondered freehand art and stamping and real dried flowers before deciding on glitter placement to make my nail bouquet.

I started with a base of Catrice Hugo Moss, a deep green creme, then used one of my dotting tools to pick and place glitter out of Salon Perfect Flower Power and Mad About Mod before finishing with Gelous, Beauty Secrets Top Coat, and OPI Matte Top Coat.





And here's how I built up this look, starting with my key raw materials—

Salon Perfect Flower Power:



Salon Perfect Mad About Mod:



Trying out some ideas on a black base:



Before matte topcoat:



Mattified:



Experimenting before taking it off with adding dotting tool dots of Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure Teesta Turquoise; the blobby nature of some of my dots shows why I didn't try to do this whole design with a dotting tool:



I think I want to revisit this look sometime, maybe on a slightly lighter green base, and definitely taking more care to get the glitters exactly where I want them (with no stragglers hitching a ride on the larger glitters, either) and experimenting first to find just the right topcoat layers to smooth with no bubbles or other issues. Despite the flaws I see when I study the macro shots, I had fun doing this and was definitely tempted to cancel my planned swatching session the next day so I could wear this longer.



Click through the links at the bottom to see what other bloggers did for this challenge.

An InLinkz Link-up