Abstract Tree Design with RCM

Hi again!  I said it would take me a few days to get photos of the nails I did a tutorial for in my last post, and it did.  But I finally come bearing pictures!

 

For these nails, I started out with  one coat of Red Carpet Manicure "So Icey" as a base.   This is a really fine, sheer, packed silver micro-shimmer with intermittent flecks of a silver holographic glitter.  It's definitely sheer at one coat, but it is so dense that I think you might be able to build it up to opaque with three coats! The holographic glitter kind of becomes lost when I put nail my nail design on top of it, but I tried to capture it in a photo:

 

Then, on top of that I used three coats of Red Carpet Manicure "Behind the Scenes" to make a triangle/tree shape.  Behind the Scenes is a gorgeous emerald green with slight blue undertones, which also has a small warm-toned shimmer to it.  This shimmer reflects gold and orange, with a few hints of green.   Unfortunately this gel polish is dark enough that it absorbs light, and looks almost black in some lighting--so the shimmers that it carries kind of become lost in some light, too. The best representation of this color, therefore, is probably in the first photo with flash or the close-up macro shot I'll post below.  

But it still is really beautiful, and it applies really well--unlike the somewhat similar green Gelish shade "A Runway for the Money" or "Dear Johnny Green", or the RCM equivalent "Diva in Disguise".  So if you don't like troublesome gel shades, I'd go for this one any day. 

Here's my attempted macro shot on the left--which shows mostly gold and green reflective shimmers--and an outtake from a picture with flash on the right--which shows some of the orange-gold reflects as well.  

Lastly, the gold glitters I used at the top of the trees are from the "Born Pretty Store".  I'm still perfecting my method to get those large glitters to stay encased in gel easily. 

That's all for today, I guess...see you in 2014!