Working on Crystal Planning

Today is Saturday, had an early start, got some washing and tidying done, got the bunny sorted, got some supplies in for Phil (the cat) and decided to build some templates for designs on Pintrest I really like.

I love the stuff that nailsbycaroline619 does. She makes crystal nails look awesome, so I found a couple of examples I really love and made a template. Then I put the designs into reality.

First attempt – nail on the left. NailsbyCarolina puts crystals together that just look amazing. So this is a crystal and light pink design. All crystals from Temu, as I do not want to waste the good crystals until I know the finished designs are going to look ok. She makes these nails look so so good, but I think this first attempt sucked. So for the next attempt, I decided to tweak it.

2nd attempt – second nail. This time I’m using crystal and light blue, and I changed the crystal sizes to give better balance. It looked weird, so I added additional crystals (the pink opals) to give it a better proportional layout. I like this, but it’s not good enough. It’s not where I want it to be, if that makes sense? I still need (read – would very much like) it to be better.

Almost forgot, I dropped a crystal whilst I was doing this nail, and couldn’t find it anywhere. At the end, when I was cleaning the crystals I found it – it’s very stuck to the left clear crystal, second row down. DOH!! Next time I’ll check my design if I drop a crystal on the way to putting it in place. LOL though, can’t believe it was totally hidden in plain sight.

Third attempt, and third nail. This combo is crystal and golden shadow. I’ve tweaked the crystal sizes again, so now the centre crystal is the largest, but I think it’s too big this time, and it needs more round the sides around the super large crystal – something about it just doesn’t look how I want it to look. So, I’ll have another play another day, but I was done with this design today. Good practice for matching colours and sizes though, so feel like I learned a lot. Thinking about maybe making some press on nails, for me, so I can add on big nails when I need to. I still need to change the crystal sizes, and also, I think smaller caviar beads might be better.

On a plus note, my positioning of the crystals, and their alignment, has improved dramatically since I started, so that’s good to see a bit of progress.

Finally, the right design is supposed to be more suitable for a smaller nail, as the likely hood that I’m going to be wearing these super long, super sparkly nails, is really… very very small.

The pearl in the centre is from Temu, and OMG it’s massive. I tried to file it down a bit so it didn’t stick up on the nail too much, but, yeah, FAIL!!

I couldn’t get the caviar beads around the pearl to stay in place as I had too much of a gap around the nail where the pearl was attached and the caviar beads kept disappearing under the pearl, so next time, I need to fill that gap better. I used acrygel in the end to give it more support but boy that is messy stuff. I totally didn’t think about using the slip liquid on my brush to manipulate it into place better. Hopefully, I will remember for next time.

Here’s the template I made today: