NOTD Before & After: My first sponging gradient!

Hello!

Today I have Color Club's Ulterior Motive for you. This reminds me a little bit of the Take Wing collection, because the texture is similar and it has the same sort of glass-fleck intensity.

Outside direct light

Outside shade

If you click on the picture, you can see the lovely blue flecks throughout it; you can see them fairly well in the shade picture, but trust me. I wanted to play those up, so I picked a neat Milani glitter (Twinkle) I recently got that I thought would match well...it matched so well, in fact that you can only see the blue glitter, not the purple!:

Because the glitter worked so well, I wanted to stamp on the other nails with a similar blue polish, and I thought China Glaze Frostbite would be perfect. Unfortunately, the color didn't stamp well on this polish, so I couldn't go forward with that. But I did something else instead--I tried my very first sponging gradient every. I wanted the gradient to be sort of like french tips that fade down into the main color... I was really pleasantly surprised at how easy it was, I'd always been worried it would be more difficult. Here's how it came out:

I really love this look, even if the gradient is a little bit more subtle than the glitter (the blue in the glitter is a little brighter). I went back and forth about putting a titch of glitter on the tips to balance it out, but for an evening left it alone--I've been on a roll lately of taking things one step too far and ruining the look so I thought I'd rein myself in. It was nice to look down occasionally and be impressed at how nicely the colors go together. :)

But then when I woke up the next day, I decided to go for it, and here's what I got:

I love how this came out! Just a tiny line of glitter at the top balanced out the accent nail and topped off the gradient. If I had put more I think it would have overwhelmed the gradient, but for once I seemed to manage to not overdo it. So maybe the lesson I need to learn is that to avoid ruining things I don't need to leave off the last step entirely, but just find a way to make whatever my last idea is...subtler. :)

Thanks for looking,

M.