Lucky Year of the Dragon

I spotted these Chinese dragon nail charms maybe two years ago and I knew that I wanted to use them to paint Year of the Dragon nails for Chinese New Year. So I kept my eye on the listing and purchased them this November and they are huge! Pretty much requiring that I use my longest false nail sets. They were also very bright and shiny new so I actually took some watered down black acrylic paint and slopped it all over the charms I used to help enhance all the lovely details. They are also really heavy. I would not recommend these for day to day use or even suggest that anyone use them on false nails like I did. If you even want a prayer of keeping these babies attached to your fingers by the end of the day, they would need to be embedded deep into the false nails so we’re talking forming your acrylic or gel nails around it. You can see in the thumb shot just how much they stick out.

But, oh, what a statement they make. I kinda want to figure out some kind of craft project with them since they came in a set of ten, but I have no ideas currently. It’s a pet peeve of mine to have two objects facing the same way so I couldn’t even go the earring route and a necklace would only use of them… 🤔

Year of the Dragon nail art using their lucky colors (grey, silver, gold) with stampings of clouds and big golden Chinese dragon nail charms. — Lucky Year of the Dragon

Nail art products used

Base Polishes:: KADS’ “Pearly Dark Gold” and Zoya’s “Dove“
Stamping Polishes:: Essie’s “No Place Like Chrome“, Hit the Bottle’s “Bun Intended“, and KADS’ “Pearly Dark Gold“
Nail Charm:: Large golden Chinese dragon nail charms with a little watered down black acrylic paint to “age” it.
Stamping Plates:: Moyou London “Zodiac Collection 17” (dragon chinese character); UberChic Beauty “Far East 02” (clouds)

Items in italics are debuting on the blog for the first time.

As per tradition, we started with the lucky colors for Dragons (grey, silver, and gold). The rest of my plans were all drawn up when I started painting and, like many battles, they did not survive the encounter with implementation. I was trying to do too much and it looked odd. So I literally “scaled” back by dropping the scale patterns that were also supposed to be stamped in the background and stuck to just using the clouds. As larger shapes, I found they balanced better with the massive nail charms.

So I’d already had to restart once and then I managed to stamp the dragon symbol off center on the nail… This was extra frustrating because these nails are really long so it takes more than one stamp to cover them completely and the pattern cuts off mid-cloud…i.e. lots of extra manipulation to get the nails fully covered. I took a deep breath and tried to think of what else I could do that would not require starting over again. Faking a double stamp was my only conclusion so I freehanded a gold line along the bottom-right side of the stamp and it not only worked but made it look much nicer. Failing upward feels so good, y’all.