Guest Post: Fall Mani Tutorial by Messy Mansion!

Today I have a guest post for you from Julia who blogs at  Messy Mansion and she has a pretty fall manicure tutorial for you today Monkeys! Thanks Julia, be sure to stop by and tell her hello!

Earlier in the week I did my nails in fall colours. In Australia it's spring.. and this look can be wonderfully spring-like if you chose a range of pink colours instead of the brownish shades.  Actually, any group of similar shades would work really well.  So.. lets get started!

You will need the following:

• Basic stamping tools (stamper and scraper. We’d recommend the XL squishy stamper as it works great on full nail designs like these ones.)
• Basic nail art tools – basecoat, topcoat, cleanup tools like acetone, etc.
• Additionally.. you’ll need 4 creme nail varnishes in various tones of brown.  Ombre is nice, but it doesn’t have to be.  Mine isn’t.
• A stamping colour.   I’ve used China Glaze “Rare and Radiant”.
• You’ll also need image plate M83.

Your first step is to basecoat your nails.  I use OPI basecoat.   You can also use treatment products at this point including things like OPI Nail Envy, or Chip Skip.

Start off painting your nails with the darkest colour on your pinky, graduating to the lightest colour on your index finger.  Repeat the darkest colour again on your thumbs.  While you are working through the colours, swatch a patch so you can use it for testing later.  I swatch on the back of business cards, then I can keep them to refer back to later.

Having done my nails and swatches on the card, I needed to chose which colour to stamp with.   The little swatches gave me something to practice on.  There are 3 lovely greenish tones in the China Glaze Bohemian collection.. but I wasn’t too sure which was going to look good on *all* of these brown colours.  So I did a little test with a small design on each swatch.  Here are my swatches with the test stamping.

I decided that I liked “Rare and Radiant” best.. that’s the one at the top of the swatches.    Doing test strips like this is a great idea – it stops you using a colour that you find doesn’t work on all of your chosen brown cremes.    I remember the first time I did a mani like this.. I got to the end and just hated the look of the stamped colour on the last base colour I’d used!  Too late by then to change it all out, unfortunately!  :(
There was just one last thing I wanted to try out.  Just recently I picked up a gorgeous topcoat from www.zanynailz.com called “Flora”.  It’s a beautiful duochrome.. green to gold.  I thought about putting this on top, but I was a bit worried about obscuring the details of the stamping.  Luckily I had my trusty swatches already done, so I tested the topcoat over them all, just to see how it would go.  Glad I did because as much as I love this topcoat, it wasn’t right on all of the colours.  Here’s my swatch again, with the topcoat as well.
M Series plates can be pretty small and the images may not cover all of your nail.  If this is the case and you have an XL squishy stamper, you can pop the stamper out of the holder, and squeeze it to make the image larger.  I often need to do this with my thumb nail.


Fall is a great time of year… so many lovely colour combinations to use!  I hope this tutorial has been helpful to you

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