Remember being a kid on really rainy days and splashing through puddles or pounding on mudpiles? This is sort of like that. I wanted to get a little messy today.

So I’m glad I had the foresight to take a picture of the base color alone since I wound up pretty much completely obscuring it. I started with a two coat base of ULTA Taupe On A Rope, a quiet sort of rich brown with really faint gold hilights. Kind of a bumpy finish, but any topcoat or third coat should take care of that if this is where the madness stopped.

With that set, I went into the kitchen, laid down a coat of foil glue, and cracked open a couple of pigment and embossing powders. You can get these at craft and hobby stores, at specialty arts shops, or you can even do this on the cheap using eye shadow/powder if you want. First I went in a blew some powder over the semi-dry glue coat, which mimics the splatter technique of the pen without being a total pain to clean up — just get a little bit on the tip of a brush with some bushy bristles that’ll loosely hold it and blow on it.

Following that technique (because don’t ya know that blue indigo landed pretty heavy) I used the big fan brush to add full swipes of powder onto the nail, just light coats and alternating colors til I realized I’d wiped out that ULTA pretty well.

Finish it with a topcoat (the lighter your hand is on this the better, you’ll avoid streaking out the powders so much) and, somewhere in the middle of that drying, the sun actually came out for a total of 5 minutes today so I chased that as hard as I could (hence the horrible non-cleanup job here) to give a better look as how these powders can play in the sunlight. And basically a dream to clean up: you can get all the shimmer, splatter and fun without getting paint all over your fingers, just wash the extra powder off once the topcoat dries (not pictured here obviously).