NOTD: FingerFood's Theme Buffet #3 - Weather

So, here is week 3 of FingerFood's Theme Buffet. It may be Thursday, but I finally got around to posting this! Better late than never, I suppose.

Originally, I had planned on doing a lightning scene, but after seeing so many awesome lightning manicures, I decided to go with rain. Rainbow rain, at that!




I actually painted this yesterday, but unfortunately wasn't able to photograph and post it here until today. Excuse the horrible state of my cuticles at the moment.  This brutally cold weather and the 14 inches (35cm) of snow we just got haven't been very kind to them.

The one problem with using matte finish polishes is that you can't really use a top coat. In this case, I'm using Julep's Brit as a base color, which is a matte suede finish. It's beautiful and, well, suede-like in person. The photos don't show nearly the amount of variation in the gunmetal color. Unfortunately I'm having some serious tip wear after just a day. At least it didn't affect the nail art TOO much before I could take pictures!

That said, even though I couldn't smooth things out with top coat, I DO love the effect of the glossy creme polishes against the matte base color.

This manicure features the following polishes:

• Base color: Julep - Brit
• Blue dots and raindrops: Julep - Something Blue
• Green dots and raindrops: Pure Ice - Wild Thing
• Yellow dots and raindrops: Julep - Abbie
• Orange dots and raindrops: Julep - Cody
• Pink dots and raindrops: Julep - Raegan
• Umbrella: Konad special black
• Umbrella stamping: Shany XXL Nail Plate B

Yeah, lots of Julep polishes in this one. I took advantage of their warehouse sale this past December and picked up a bunch of colors. (I have some issues with Julep at the moment, though, since I'm affected by their new skip policy change despite having signed up under the old policy. I'll probably rant about this some other time).

This is the first time I've done a design with polka dots since getting nail dotting tools and it makes a WORLD of difference in how cleanly and uniformly they come out. Previously, I was  using a toothpick that had its point cut off to do dotting.  I LOVE polka dots to death, so I foresee myself trying them out more in the future.