I do this every time...

           I've had a couple people jokingly say that I should paint nails for a living, to which I jokingly respond that there's no way I could ever make that work. Each time I paint my nails it's two hours of mistakes and redos. For one, I've long given up on putting on polish without getting it all over my fingers. I'm more from the school of "paint now, clean up later." Also, I have a tendency to screw up as I go along; pretty much every nail design is completed through a string of curses and cries of despair as I manage to screw up yet another finger. Nine times out of ten, my nails end up looking like this:

Above: attempt number two at having nails that look good.

          Can you imagine? You go in to get your nails done, and after an hour you think you're getting close to being finished. Suddenly, the person doing them grabs some nail polish remover and takes off three of your near-complete designs. After a moment of shock, you manage to pull yourself together and demand, "What the hell are you doing?" To which your manicurist replies, "Oh, I screwed up on those ones, so I need to take them off and start again." Then she manages to screw up another nail, and another, and suddenly your manicure took twice as long as it should have and isn't pretty enough for it to be worth it. No, I'll stick to doing my own nails, thank you very much.

           Now, for this week's nails! Here's the final product:

          I needed to try and match a dress I'm going to be wearing to a wedding this weekend. I didn't have much time so I didn't want a very intricate design, and I had to find one that suited my currently very short nails. A few sites show how to do gradient nails by blending the colours using a toothpick, and while I like the look I've tried it and, well, that method is a little outside my skill level right now. I've used sponges on my nails before though, and decided to try to use one to get a similar effect. So I grabbed a few supplies and gave it my best shot.

          First I applied my base colour:

Colour shown is Sea Siren from LA Colors. You can see my "clean up later" method too.

         The next (and final) step was to add the dark colour to make the gradient. To do this, I used a pair of tweezers to rip off a piece of a makeup  pad, like so:

          I then used it to sponge on the dark polish in a variety of thicknesses. I had a few issues with the sponge leaving behind little crumbs in my nail polish, but I found that they were fairly easy to remove with the tweezers and any marks left behind weren't noticeable. For the transition point, I would dip the sponge in the polish, blot it on some paper a few times, and then applied it to the nails. On some nails this still left a very noticeable line, so on those I would sponge some of the lighter colour over top.

Colour shown is Blue Lagoon by LA Colors.

           After that it was simply a matter of cleaning the nails and putting on a top coat, and voila! Gradient nails that didn't require a toothpick. They are by no means perfect, but I'm still happy with the overall effect. I do wish I'd chosen a different base coat, this one ended up looking a lot more green than I though it would and so it doesn't match my blue dress as well as I would like. But that's just me being picky.

          On another note, my brushes arrived in the mail today! I've got a few plans for them, can't wait until I get to try them out next week.