Wednesday, September 12, 2012

First Beauty Minions Assignment!

I recently joined a group called Beauty Minions.  It was started by Heather from My Husband Ate All My Ice Cream.  She's giving us bi-weekly assignments, a theme for us to translate into pretty much anything beauty related.  I will obviously be doing them on my nails because it's kinda my thing.  Check out the first of the Beauty Minions post to see all of the participants entries!

The first theme was 50 Shades of Grey. Now, I have never read this book so my inspiration came solely from the title. I knew right away I would do a gradient with white, grey and black. The black didn't really come out in the end but that's okay since I was just trying to get the different shades of grey.


I was planning on doing the gradient with a sponge but it just wasn't working out.  It was pulling up the polish and making too much texture. I took that all off and decided to try a technique I've seen using a fan brush instead. It was pretty messy but I love how it turned out!  I really like how you can see the brush strokes but the transition is still so smooth.
 
 
I wish now that I had taken some picture of the process but it's pretty simple.  I just put vertical stripes of white, grey and black on some plastic and then swiped the fan brush through it (vertically) a few times to blend the colors together.  I picked up quite a bit of paint on the brush so I could cover the nail in one swipe. 
 
The hardest part was finishing the side of the nail where the brush stroke ends.  At first I kept getting a bare spot. You can kinda see on the ring and pinky finger where the brush stroke stops and I had to fill it in. I also used a little thinner on my brush to help the colors run together and make it easier to work with. 
 
 
Love the look, hate the clean up!  I made a serious mess.  The side where the brush stroke started would be fairly clean but the other side tended to pool up with polish.  I had never done this before so hopefully next time I can find a way to cut back on clean up!
 
I hope you enjoyed this weeks Beauty Minion Assignment.  Go check out the other gals work here and stay tuned for a new Beauty Minions post (and hopefully some posts in between) in a couple weeks!