Mani Thursdays 1: Galaxy Nails (Tutorial)

Hi! Here's the first post on this blog and the first Mani Thursday. OK, enough pointing out the obvious.

I've done galaxy nails this time because they a) seemed fun to do, and b) seemed fairly easy, which is a major requirement for me.

There are quite a few versions of galaxy nail art out there. I loved Pretty (Squared)'s version but it seemed very difficult. I ended up doing a sort of mixture of Nail Art 101's version and Polish and Pearl's version, with the inspiration for the white stars coming from the Nailasaurus' pastel galaxy nails (which I'll have to try sometime, except I don't have the right colors).

I'm only going to be posting on here once or twice a week, so I thought I might as well do a tutorial -- I mean, just posting a picture once a week seems a little lazy (plus, that's kind of what I'm doing for my Wordpress blog). But enough of me talking. Here we go! (oh, and there aren't photos for the first 2 steps because the photos came out terribly, so I was like "well... blah, I'm not putting those out there")

Materials used:

Tools: Sponge (I used one of those huge sponges you use to wash cars); nail art brush (a thin one!)
Polishes: Revlon base coat; Sally Hansen top coat; Deborah Lippmann Twilight Tone, I Fought the Law, and Invincible; Sally Hansen White Out; Funky Fingers Mood Ring; and Jin Soon Coral Peony

Step 1: paint on a base coat and an opaque coat of black polish (it can have sparkles or not, it doesn't matter; I used black sparkly polish because I don't have plain black).

Step 2: sponge on some white polish in one area. Try not to make it like a huge glob of white in the middle of the nail, which is what happened for me my first try. Sponge it on lightly, not in a circle, and not in the center of the nail.

Step 3: sponge on some green/blue polish (optional). I didn't do this for my first two nails and I don't think it makes a difference, but I had this perfect green/blue sparkly polish that I really wanted to use, so...

Step 4: sponge on some dark blue polish somewhat overlapping with the white. Don't completely cover the white, but make the two colors overlap. Try blending them together with a fresh piece of sponge -- you don't want harsh lines between the colors.

Step 5: sponge on some violet polish, also somewhat overlapping with the white and pretty close to the blue. There should still be a fairly large area of uncovered white. Once again, try to soften the lines between the colors with a fresh piece of sponge.

Step 6: sponge on some orangey-pink, on top of the remaining showing white. For the last time, try to soften the lines between the colors. You'll want this pink to be significantly different from the purple you use, so that it'll stand out a little.

Step 7: add some white starry-like dots on the remaining showing black.

Step 8: add a star somewhere in the purple-blue-pink cloud (this was the hardest part... argh, my hand shakes so much!)

Step 9: top coat! Then remove excess polish with a Q-Tip (or a cheap generic equivalent!)
Step 10: admire nails and take pictures!

This design is pretty much explained by the pictures, though, so you can just skip over all the wordy instruction things that are really not very helpful.

Helpful tip: listen to music while doing this. It makes it so much better (and it stops me from constantly feeling my nails -- "are they dry yet? How about now? Or now? Or... argh, now I have to redo them!!"). Actually, listening to music makes a lot of things better. So... listen to music all the time? Except when you're practicing your instrument -- oh, never mind. Blah. This tip was not very helpful.

But anyways, hope you like it :)

The Nail Snail