Tuesday Tutorial: Checkered Nails Two Ways

Hi Ya'll!

First off- don't miss out on the GIVEAWAY I'm hosting on Monday's post http://glimpsesofthemoon.blogspot.com/2013/06/200th-post-and-giveaway.html
to celebrate my 200th post on Glimpses of the Moon!  It's just a little love from me to you!

Now that you've gone and entered yourself to win some fabulous polishes (a mini-polish haul if you will), welcome to another humble tutorial where I show you how I bumble through a nail art technique each week.  This week we tackle checkered nails, or checkered flag nails.  I'm going to be trying two techniques in order to achieve this look:

 On all fingers but the middle, I free-handed the look using a nail striper brush.  On the middle finger I utilized striping tape.  Let's get to it and find out which technique won the day.

1) First off paint all of your nails two coats of opaque white polish.

 2) To achieve this look without taping anything off, start by painting vertical lines on your nails, evenly spaced apart.

3) Until they look like this:

4) This same step, but using the taping method, apply the striping tape vertically on each nail.  As you can see I had to use two strips of tape for each line because my tape wasn't thick enough.  This added considerably to the tedious nature of the taping option(keep in mind).

5) Using black polish, cover the nail entirely and without waiting too long, peel each piece of tape off carefully.

6) This is how it will look after you remove the tape.

7) For the horizontal stripes that you need in order to make the black and white checkered appearance, either stripe with your brush evenly across the nail(finger on the left) or reapply the tape in the same manner as before, but horizontally this time.  Make sure you allow for dry time if doing the taping method.

8) Remove the tape, apply top coat, and clean up around the nail with acetone and a flat angled brush.  There you have it, a checkered mani.  You could also add flashes of neon in randomly chosen white spaces.

Conclusions:  If you choose to freehand you will probably have larger stripes to allow for any fixes of wobbly lines, however, your time is significantly cut when compared to the taping method.  Taping off the white space you want to leave on the nail does provide tighter lines, but my experience with taping-off such small spaces meant I had to go back in with white and cover up any places that the tape didn't pick up off the nail completely(where the black paint had landed on an intended white space during tape removal).  Overall even though taping made a cleaner, tighter appearance, I preferred free-handing this checkered nail art.  Both techniques required a bit of tampering with, but in the end the taping just took too long, just to be disappointed if the tape didn't lift off just right.  Don't get me wrong- I am in love with my striping tape, but for this look it just didn't hold up.  Perhaps more practice ;)  But until then, free-hand takes the cake.

I hope you try this look out for yourself.  And hey- if you change the black to red or blue(or red and blue on alternating nails) you could have a 4th of July picnic manicure for this next month coming up.  Go ahead; what does it hurt to give it a try?  See you tomorrow.

Song of the Day:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMyf9Z5wKmM

Over and out.