The Nail Challenge Collaborative - Pastels - Week 3

For the third mani I did for the Nail Challenge Collaborative's April theme "Pastels", I chose one of my untrieds as my base: essence madly purpled from their recent Floral Grunge collection. It was the only polish that still interested when I found the collection in store... and it's also the only one that mostly got favorable opinions from other bloggers. Well, it's a little different from what I expected, but it served its purpose for this mani.

So, I decided to paint a couple of flowers again. I'm always looking at Maria's flowers in awe and I haven't tried painting some in awhile... Her daily flower posts really inspire me a lot. I just wish I would have the patience to paint them more often! :D If you don't know Maria's blog yet, please take a look! It's definitely worth it!

What I painted in the end are these:

I'm under the impression that I used to be able to control my striping brushes a lot better last year... Some of the lines turned out a little thick, but all in all, I was satisfied. I just need more practice.

The base turned out to be darker than I thought. The polish dries darker than it looks in the bottle, but since I only used black and white acrylic paint to paint the flowers, the contrast is still there. But is this still 'pastel'? Not sure. Anyway, since I used acrylic paint, I obviously had to use topcoat to seal it.

Lastly, a picture of essence madly purpled on its own. It's actually supposed to be a matte polish - at least, that's what the bottle cap says. In my opinion this is not really matte. But it's not suede either. I tried a couple of my polishes and found it closest to the finish of Orly Plastix polishes - just with a hint of shimmer.

This is two coats. It applied just fine, but looking at my pictures, I think some of my nails could have used a third coat. No topcoat here.

What do you think?

Thanks for reading~