Tuesday Tutorial: Horizontal Gradient no Sponging

Look out- it's another step-by-step tutorial for you.  This is going to feature a horizontal gradient that requires no sponging!  The finished look will be something like this:

As you can see- it's definitely a different look for a gradient, and if you choose not to use a blend of your two base colors and use a white instead, it won't be a gradient at all, but more like a "white noise" kind of effect.  If you want to achieve the effect in this look, here's what you will do.

1) Start with your favorite strengthening base coat and paint one half of your nail two coats of your first color.

2) Using two coats of your second polish, paint the rest of your nail so you have this two-toned appearance.

3) Now take a bit of each color and mix them together.  Use this new color and a striper brush paint haphazard lines horizontally across your nail.  Here's a first layer of the lines.

4)  Paint more lines using this color until almost the entire line dividing the two original colors is covered.

5)  Do this to every nail, and then paint a top coat over top of everything.  As you can see the top coat really smoothed the contrast of colors, so especially from far away, this basically looks like a gradient :)

Like I said, you could definitely use a completely contrasting color for the striping in the middle and transform this nail art into something totally different.  I hope you give this look a try and let me know how it turns out!
The colors used here are NYC Apple Fizz and Raindrop.

Here's some music for you to get creative with.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GMQLjzVGfw

Over and out