Phoenix In Flight

So #clairestelle8 has all mythical creature prompts this month (like /cough unicorn) and that’s pretty hard for me to resist. Happily, I already had designs I wanted to do for most of these beasties, especially the phoenix. I have already painted a few phoenix designs before, but I bought OS-03 specifically for this phoenix. Like, it’s great when I get to the other images, but this was the one for me. I have done a few designs that go across the nails, but I had yet to tackle a vertical design. This is probably the main reason why have not already seen me use this image since I’ve had this plate for months. I think I did fairly well with the placement, but I think if I were to do it again, I’d bump the bird up a little more and cut off his crest rather than his booty.

• Reusable white gel base
• Stamping Polish:
  Mundo de Unas’ “Dark Grey”
• Watercolor paints from Michael’s
• Stamping Plate:
  OS-03

Challenge prompt
#clairestelle8march – phoenix

I was so mentally tired when I started putting this together I forgot to take a photo before I started painting. Sorry!

My process was fairly simple. Hah. I used my konad stamper to pick up parts of the phoenix and stamp them onto a silicone mat. Then I painted clear polish on them to turn them into decals. From there, I pried them off the mat with tweezers, put the decal on the clear stamper, lined it up with the other decals, and used more clear polish to stick them together into one big decal. Then I applied the image bit by bit on my nails so it would line up well.

This takes longer than using a clear stamper and eyeballing it, but clear stampers don’t work well enough in my environment for me to do that anyway so I stuck with this. After the image was on my nails, I top coated with Seche Vite followed with a matte top coat to give the paint some texture to adhere to. Then I painted on that with watercolor. As you can see below, the watercolor pigment obscures the lines of the stamping a little. So I went over the lines with a clean brush to clear it up a bit and top coated. The glossy top coat helped the most in clearing up the lines.

I think this time I prefer the glossy version. What do you think? Let me know in the comments. 🙂