Tuesday Tutorial: Easy Tape Mani

Welcome to another tutorial :)  One of my favorite tools for quick and easy, yet still striking manicures, is just a bit of tape.  You can achieve this look here with just three polishes and some tape, weather you use striping tape as I have done or simply some scotch tape, you'll achieve the same result.

1) Start out with clean dry nails, and paint one coat of strengthening base coat on each nail.  Pick your base color (the one that will peak through as the triangle in the middle of the nail) and paint each nail two coats of this color.  Wait at least 20 minutes for this to dry.  You can use the aid of a fast dry top coat, or speed dry spray.

2) After your base is dried enough to apply tape and not have it peel off any polish, place your piece of tape in a diagonal to form one side of the triangle.  Paint one thick coat of your second polish.  Make sure it's a polish that will reach opacity rather quickly because you need to remove the tape carefully before the second polish begins to dry too much.

As you can see- I didn't remove the tape quickly enough on this one because I was busy taking a picture...so a bit of the green polish got stringy and fell over onto the charcoal.  That can be easily touched up if it happens. :)

2) Wait at least 20 more minutes and place a second piece of tape to block off the other side of the triangle, and with a similarly opaque polish, paint one thick coat.

3) Quickly and carefully remove this piece of tape.

4) Time for clean-up.  As you can see in the above picture, I have painted a bit outside the lines.  Take a flat head brush and some nail polish remover and run the brush along any sides of your fingers that need a little touch-up.

5) Give yourself a nice generous amount of top coat to even out your design and there you have it.

The colors used here are Zoya Noot, Color Club Sweet Pea, and Julie G Holla Peno.

Here's hoping you try this out for yourself.  Get creative with the tape.  You can cut lots of strips and just see where your imagination takes you. :)

Song of the Day:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngBwzR1ZQHE

Get up and dance for cryin' out loud!

Over and out.