Before & After: Under Da Sea (manicure swap with @FierceFatFirefly!)

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Hello!

A new friend of mine, @FierceFatFirefly on Instagram, asked me if I wanted to do a manicure swap. I knew right away I wanted to, because she'd just done a manicure I wanted to copy using UberChic Beauty's Sweet April plate. Way back when I reviewed it, I mentioned wanting to do an underwater scene with one part of the plate, and I never got around to it--well, Dot did, and she made it awesome!

You can find her mani here to see what I was shooting for.

I started with a base of Zoya Muse, which I'm currently obsessed with because I need to go to the beach and it makes me feel like I'm there:

UberChic Beauty Sweet April

The part I used for the mani is approximately this bit, located just a little to the left of her back--my stamping was a tiny bit off from this:

UberChic Beauty Sweet April

You can find my original review of this plate here. As a reminder, I consider this to be an advanced stamping plate--don't start with this one if you've never stamped before. The design wasn't designed specifically for stamping, it came from a turn-of-the-century book, so it's a little more crowded in places than most of the stamping images you'll find. For this reason, you'll need to scrape well to make sure you get enough coverage and also get the excess polish off, and you'll want to use a light hand when you pick up the image with your stamper. It takes a little more care to use a plate like this, but it's so totally worth it.


We agreed it was okay to make changes as long as the basics were the same; I decided to have the pattern on three accent nails. I also didn't have polishes that were quite as vibrant as hers, but tried to get close.


To get the underwater scene, I first stamped the image in silver, with Messy Mansion's Sterling stamping polish. Then I used what I call a reversed lead-lighting technique; normally when you lead-light you stamp in black over a light polish, and color in between the stamped lines. For this technique, you stamp a light polish over a dark background, and color on the stamped portions.


For the lead-lighting part, I used L.A. Colors Tahiti Sunrise, Fiji Purple, and Nuclear Energy, Ulta One In A Chameleon, and Color Club Wild Cactus; this last one wasn't sheer enough to see through, so I diluted it with a bit of topcoat to make it more sheer. I used UberChic Beauty's detail nail art brush to paint the image. Here's how it came out:

Under Da Sea with Zoya Muse and UberChic Beauty Sweet April

Under Da Sea with Zoya Muse and UberChic Beauty Sweet April

I love how this came out!! I love the pop of color from the anemones and the swirls of seaweed around them. This didn't come out quite as vibrantly colorful as Dot's but I think it's pretty bright and fun.


So which one of my manicures did she choose? She chose my Mother of Dragons manicure that used  UberChic Beauty's Fairytale 01 plate (you can find my original post with full information on this mani here):

Mother Of Dragons

Watch her feed to see what she did--I got to see a sneak peek of the final design, and she definitely improved on mine!


Thank you, Dot, for a fun swap!! :)


Happy Stamping,
M.