striping tape

GOT Polish: Skittles

I’m really pleased with this one and loved having it on my nails for a day! I decided to do a skittles mani using three of my very favourite polishes with different techniques on each nail.

Some of these are techniques I’ve loved from the very first time I tried them, namely water-marbling and gradients. I do a lot of gradients because it’s an effect I really love.

Striping tape, on the other hand, is one of my most hated techniques as I frequently mess it up. So I’m absolutely thrilled to have succeeded this time with relatively clean and straight lines! A couple of weeks ago I promised myself I’d work on striping tape manis and improve my skills – this is step one! Look out for more striping tape nail art coming up!

Stamping is the newest technique for me and I only own a couple of stamping plates. It might not be a perfect stamp, but at the moment I’m happy just to get the polish picked up and relocated to my nail!

This mani put a big smile on my face today even though it’s been a long and tiring week.

I used: Baker Street – Nails Inc, For Audrey – China Glaze, My Boyfriend Scales Walls – OPI.

Laser Striping Tape

It was kind of strange not having a theme to follow after the April challenge finishing, so I decided to do something simple and return to trying to get perfectly straight lines with striping tape!

I waited much much longer for the base colour to dry this time and the results were much better than my previous attempts at using striping tape. So, as with just about everything in nail art, I’ve learnt that patience is the answer.

I also used two really beautiful colours so that probably helped this manicure to look great!

I used: Draycott Terrace – Nails Inc, Tristam – A England

Rays with striping tape

After my first slightly frustrating attempt at using striping tape I decided to use it to mask rather than as decoration and chose to do some simple rays as inspired by The Manicured Monkey

It was more successful although my lines weren’t super sharp and I made the mistake of not waiting long enough for them to dry before top coating. I’m at the bottom of my top coat bottle and it’s gone a bit gloopy so that probably didn’t help… Luckily only the middle finger really suffered!

I had wanted to do a kind of rainbow stripe effect under the main colour, but with subtle, non-rainbow metallics. This didn’t quite work and the rays just look silver. Never mind. Lots to learn from this manicure!

I used: Princess Tears – A England, Fit for a Queen – Ciaté and Crash + Burn – Urban Decay.

Purple Stripes

I have never really liked using tape but I thought if I finally bought some proper striping tape all that might change – as it’s mainly the cutting up little pieces of tape which frustrates me. So I bought one of those cheap cheap packs off eBay and they arrived the other day.

I didn’t want to do anything too difficult for my first attempt at using striping tape so after a quick search I found this design with three bands of colour by superwowstyle on YouTube.

It took me far longer than I had imagined and the result wasn’t as neat as I’d hoped for but I did like the effect.

However – I was seriously unimpressed with my tape as my manicure looked good for a couple of hours and then the tape started to peel off… (I know, I know – what kind of quality did I expect for 40 rolls of tape for £1.99… But still!) I tried adding an extra layer of topcoat but nothing I could do would get it to stick down again, so it was a case of getting a decent photo and using the tape only for masking in future and not as decoration.