Studded sponging experiment

Today's mani is obviously not part of the Spring Challenge. I'm not finished with my nails yet and I'm not sure if I'll manage to post them today.

Today's nails were done a while ago on a whim. I just felt like playing around and trying stuff I wanted to do for a while. I had gotten so much nail art stuff that was still unused. I always feel bad about my buying habits... What makes me want to post about this mani is a small contest held by Dani from Dani's Beauty Blog to celebrate her blogiversary. It ends today and I forgot to post the blogpost I had almost finished preparing, but since I didn't like what I did anymore, I'm rewriting it. :P Well, Dani basically wants her contestants to show her some inspirational nail art and I just thought that my experiment might be inspirational to her, because the experimental part is easily done and I'm pretty sure she has the stuff I used.

So here's what my evening sponging experiment looked like.

There were actually three things I wanted to try that night. First was to see how the silver email color I just bought is behaving. It's not meant to be used on nails, but I had read on several stamping sites that it works great for stamping because it's so highly pigmented. It is indeed and one pot of 14ml cost me less than a bottle of polish! Second was the striping tape that had just arrived in the mail. I experienced something similar to yesterday's mani, but I had completely forgotten about that. My top coat (same as yesterday's) was peeling off and the color was a bit faded the next day, but not as badly.

But what I wanted to try most was sponging using the scratchy side of a cleaning sponge. I don't know where I read about it anymore. It was last year, I'm pretty sure... took me a while to finally try it. Using the scratchy side creates a completely different effect, but I loved how it looked. Basically, it's the same as using a regular (makeup) sponge, but the texture makes the difference. I roughed it up a little bit, because it's a bit too flat on its own. Not enough texture.

So for the sponged nails, I painted my nails white using essie Marshmallow and let that dry completely. This time this was really important, because the scratchy sponge can actually pick up some of the base color if it's not dry enough. Then, I cut a little piece out of my big kitchen sponge, dipped it into black polish and then started sponging lightly. I tried to sponge triangle shapes on two of the nails. On those nails, I added another triangle in black. Afterwards, I cut some striping tape to cover the "edges" of my triangles. My ring finger also got a tiny bit of gold polish sponged upon as well as a few gold studs.

The remaining two nails were painted black first (p2 eternal). Using a tiny brush (I used size 3/0, but I cut away about half of the brush hairs) and my newly bought silver email color (Revell #90), I freehanded the flowers and dots. I had to find out that email color takes longer to try than regular polish, which means that topcoat has to be applied later. I smudged my silver a bit, because I didn't know.

There's only one picture, sadly. When I looked through my usable pictures, I found out that they all looked somewhat alike. Boring. But here's a picture of what I used.

So that's my experiment. I'm not saying it's overall successful. There was something I didn't like about it. Not sure what though.

What do you think? Did you try sponging with the scratchy side?