matching french manicure and pedicure with stylized flowers

If you read this blog regularly or semi regularly you know that I almost never do french manicures. I just find the look to be very artificial, and plain, and it doesn't appeal to me very much. But in the spirit of continuing to try to use up some of my nail polishes before I move I decided to try a french manicure albeit with a highly stylized one stroke flower on my four accent nails. For the nude color I used one I have been really loving lately, Revlon's "sheer rose" last seen in my "jelly sandwich" manicure click here to view this post. Sheer rose is a little more  natural then most pinks traditionally used in french manicures, and therefore does not come off AS artificial looking. It is pretty opaque for a nude color and only needed two coats for the opacity pictured.

Another reason I do not like french manicures is that I dont feel they flatter my nails in particular because, unlike most people, I do not have a very pronounced "smile line" (the line where the nail tip meets my nail bed) and so the tips look funny painted on straight across. To help fix this problem I used a small size dotting tool and white acrylic paint to first outline a more pronounced "smile" line on the tips before filling in the tips with white nail polish. The white nail polish I used was "pure white tip" by Sally Hansen Maximum Growth Plus line. I HATED this particular white polish. It was extremely watery and runny and not very opaque at all. I have had good success finding a black nail polish I am pleased with but have yet to find a really great white polish.

For the stylized flowers I used water based acrylic paint in yellow and red for the petals and then carefully outlined them with black acrylic paint (dilluted with a bit of water to thin it out) and then added the frame of black dots with my dotting tool.

I get asked ALL the time how I do my non dominate hand and other then painting it laying down on my stomach with my arm resting firmly and securely on the ground there really is no secret, it just comes down to practice, and even then it never looks AS good as your dominate hand. Oh well c'est la vie right? :)

 I hope you enjoyed this week's nail art design. If you know the perfect opaque, non streaky white polish I should be trying let me know in a comment.