Valentine’s Day Nail Art – Ink & Hearts

This Valentine’s Day design is a little different from the norm, but I’m totally loving it.  I received a few different loose glitter baggies from Girly Bits Cosmetics recently, and I knew the red matte heart glitter and the .008 Fire Red Glitter would pair well.  I’ve also recently been hearing all the rage about alcohol ink techniques and have been dying to try it, so I combined these things all into one look.

I started with the black and white base colors, Pink Gellac Soft White and Beautiful Black. (SAVE $5 when you spend $35 or more on Pink Gellac at Chickettes Boutique this month! Use coupon code “LOVE5”.)  I burnished the .008 Fire Red Glitter into the tacky layer of the black polish to create a gradient effect.  You can learn how to do a glitter gradient by watching the video that I created here.

On the white nails, I randomly placed the red heart glitters onto the white nails while the top layer was still wet, and then cured the layer.  My nails are very curvy so some edges of the glitter did stick up a bit.  I applied a layer of top coat over the hearts and filled in the gaps around the glitter pieces.  After curing the top coat, I wiped off the tacky residue and began playing with inks to create the smokey look.  I’m not sure if you’ve heard about the alcohol ink technique yet… it’s pretty new to me, but it’s been all the rage in several of the groups that I belong to.  I don’t know where it originated, but I first learned about it from Kim at Ten Little Canvases.  You can create some really awesome looking marble and granite textures with this technique.  See Kim’s video on it here.  And I also found this video helpful.

I purchased some Adirondack Alcohol Inks recently, but I haven’t had time to play with them yet.  For this mani, I tried a similar technique that someone else suggested, which is to use a Sharpie marker instead of the alcohol ink!  So I scribbled over the top coat with a black sharpie marker and then dipped a small brush into isopropyl alcohol and randomly dabbed it over the ink.  It turned out pretty cool, but I definitely want to practice this technique some more.  Sharpies are a heck of a lot cheaper than the inks, but I’ll let you know what works better once I’ve had time to play with the inks.