Confessions of a glequin addict

Yeah, yeah, so I used glequins again...I promise though, there was a plan behind it all. With my last few designs I have been curious to see just how many different ways you can use them to mimic painted nail art techniques. Also I get so many questions about 2 things, how to apply glequins and what is striping tape. So today's experiment was put all those nail art elements together in an attempt to show how I use both glequins and striping tape and also to see if glequins could;

1. Do a gradient
2. Be used as polka dots
3. Lastly be used with striping tape to make lines or cut out sections.

Well I'm not entirely sold on the gradient, it looks kinda messy and chunky and doesn't have the nice fade effect so I probably need to work on that and tweak it a bit. The polka dots look cool, will definitely be using glequins for that look again. And the striping tape...hmm well, the jury is out on this one. This is the first time I have tried something like this so it was bound to have its imperfections.  I do think there is something there though, just the placement of the stripes and the sections covered needs to be reworked. I think its important to show your nail failures as much as your successes as we learn from others and also ourselves and there are many times when I do a design just for the practice then take it off straight away.

The tools I use when working with glequins. A small dotting tool to pick up each sequin, a piece of tin foil to put a little dab of base coat on. I dip into the little dot to make the end of my dotting tool sticky so it can pick up things. I normally apply base coat directly on my nails where I want to apply sequins, working with small areas at a time so that it doesn't dry on me. If I have gaps to fill I will use the dotting tool to put a tiny dot of base coat in the hole then stick the sequin over it. You can get the glequins here.

To do the stripes on my middle finger I used striping tape. Striping tape is very thin tape that can be used to make straight lines or as a straight line feature over the top of polish. It comes in many colours but there are two main kinds, holographic pretty tape and plain matte rubbery tape. The rubbery kind is best for geometric designs likes lasers or the Rubiks Cube nails that I did. Whilst the fancy holographic  looks really nice as a feature. It does still make clean lines its just a bit more finicky. You can get striping tape here.

I applied the tape, then painted base coat in-between, like in rows, then applied the glequins. Normally I would advise to pull the striping tape off as soon as you are finished painting that area, it gives cleaner lines. However as I was working with something chunky that I didn't want to move until it was set I left the tape on until I was finished the whole nail.

The base colour I used was OPI Skull & Glossbones, a putty grey creme, my go to grey as it is opaque in two coats and the colour is just so fab and chic. This polish is from the Pirates of the Caribbean collection. I hope you guys had a few of your questions answered with this post. Please comment below if there is anything else you would like to know.