NOTD Before & After: Sunflower freehand :)

Hello everyone!

Today I have another Before & After for you that's built around a challenge theme in my PCF group; today's theme is sunflowers, and I'm pretty proud of what I came up with...eventually.

I started off with Revlon's Posh, a pretty kelly green creme:

Revlon Posh indirect light

Revlon Posh in the sun

 Next, I set out to add my sunflowers. My original idea was that I was going to use Bundle Monster plate BM-207 to stamp some petals, which I'd then fill in with yellow polish. That did not work, and turned out to be a hot mess. So what I ended up having to do is use them for a general guide to free-hand some petals, using Sally Hansen Lightning. Then, in the arch at the cuticle area, I drew in the seed part of the sunflower with a dotting tool, to try to keep the feel of the individual seeds in that section of the flower. I used Finger Paints Sketchy Character for this part.

Free-handed Sunflowers

Sunflowers on a tilt

Yep, I'm pretty proud of my sunflowers...even if I shouldn't be!

I may have mentioned about 100 times that I'm not good at freehand, so you can imagine I'm pretty proud of this. Add to that the fact that I consistently forget I'm left-handed and paint the nails on my left hand whenever I'm dong a free-hand mani, so I end up using my non-dominant hand to paint, and you can just imagine how happy I am, lol. I wanted the brushstrokes to show a bit, which is why you can see the green underneath in bits--this was actually an artistic choice and not a mess-up, believe it or not--otherwise I think it would have just looked like big yellow blobs. Sure, this isn't even close to the quality of the awesome freehand work you can find out there, and that will likely be linked by the other participants below, because they rock. But it's a big step for me, and they are cute! So I couldn't be happier with them. :)

Thanks for looking! Please check out the other sunflower manicures linked by other bloggers below. :)

M.