Review & How-To, plus NCC Before & After: MoYou London Artist Collection 07

(Contains affiliate links.)

Hello!

I'm back with my review of MoYou London Artist Collection 07. First, as always, here is the video portion of today's show:

(Are you hearing it yet?)

And next up, I have the stills of the plate for you:

MoYou London Artist Collection 07

(All the old paintings on the tombs)

MoYou London Artist Collection 07

(They do the sand dance, don't ya know)

MoYou London Artist Collection 07 

And then, of course, the comparison with a standard Konad plate:

In my mind, this is an amazing plate because it has both Ancient Egyptian images (one of which is a kitty!), and a distinctly art-deco, 1920s feel. So in terms of my collection and my tastes, this is a much more versatile plate than it might appear, if you just look at it and think 'Egypt!' I will demonstrate with my Before & After below, which is this week's untried manicure for my Nail Challenge Collaborative group. :)

First, let's talk a little about what you can do with this plate. As with the other MoYou London collage plates, there are a few different approaches you can take, and most of them only require basic stamping skill, plus the ability to isolate an image. And I have a tutorial on that, which you can find by clicking here. :)

So what are my suggestions for this plate?

1) My top suggestion for all of the collage style plates is to look for full-nail images in the patterns. There are at least 4-5 full nail images here that you can use, maybe a couple more if your nails aren't that long"

2) Cartouche nails! This is an easy plate to grab either of the two already constructed cartouches, or to contruct your own with a heiroglpyh on each nail. There is a ton of them to choose from, and you can just pick the ones you like, or figure out what they mean and give your nails a hidden meaning. :)

3) Egyptian art. On either an accent nail, or over several nails, you can pull the iconic images here. There's Bast, Anubis, a Queen (how cool would it be just to use her face, just the eyes, nose and mouth, with nothing else?) the winged scarab, the cobra, etc. There's enough here to get you through tons of different manicures, alone or in different combinations.  This is part of what I did on my manicure this Monday (which I'll show below); I used Bast for my accent nail. :)

4) A few of these collage plates have an awesome pattern-morphing-into-another-pattern thing, and this is one of them. You can use this to have a pattern morph across the nails of your manicure, and that was the main technique I used in Monday's manicure. Here it is again to refresh your memory:

I got a little tricksey with this, let me show you what I did. First, take a look at the portions of the plates I used:

Instead of isolating Bast's head like I probably would in another manicure, by wiping off the patterns surrounding his head, I decided to use it to make a triple-pattern-morph manicure. I put the head on my accent nail, and on my pinkie, I carried over the fan-esque pattern. Then, on my middle finger, I stamped an area that had part of the brick pattern transitioning into the diamond pattern; because of the type of pattern it was, I was able to take the image not from right next to the head, but from down below so I could get the place where there is a transition--with a different type of pattern I wouldn't have been able to do that. Finally, I took the image for the index finger completely from the diamond area.


5) Art-deco-ness! Okay, so. The last thing I'm going to talk about is what I see as some really interesting art-deco patterns on this plate. One of the first things that caught my eye about this plate was the finial-type rods coming down under the Queen; the look like really cool beaded or fringed edging on a flapper-era dress to me, and I've wanted to do something with it since I first spied with my little eye. So for the last suggestion, I'm going to remind you to break away from the theme of the collage plate when thinking about how to use it. I think you could get your money's worth out of this plate without EVER producing one image that looked Ancient Egyptian--although why you'd want to is beyond me! (hee hee hee).

For this manicure, I started with China Glaze Glittering Garland, which has sat in my untried pile forever; it's a deep forest green with green-gold glass flecks in the finish:

China Glaze Glittering Garland

China Glaze Glittering Garland

Next, I stamped the image from Artist 07 on all of the nails except the accent nail with China Glaze Passion. For the accent nail, I used an image from MoYou London's Time Traveler Collection, Back To The 20s plate 01. Finally, I finished the whole thing with two square brads, and a sweep of topcoat:

And there you have it, a retro manicure any modern flapper girl would be proud to rock. Now tell the truth--would you think anything from this came from an Egyptian plate? No way. And there are plenty of other patterns on it that are the same way. So stretch those creative muscles, don't forget to think outside of these box with these amazing plates!

Hugs and loves,
M.

(Disclosure: this website may be compensated for linking to other sites.)

An InLinkz Link-up