Step by Step, Oh Baby, Gonna get to you girl... (My first tutorial!)

I've had some requests from people to do a step by step breakdown of some of my nail art so here is my first attempt at doing that.

First, here is a pic of the finished look:

 So how did we get there?

Step 1 (We can have lots of fun...)

I painted my nails with 4 (yikes) coats of Barry M Blue Moon. It's such a beautiful colour but does take a lot of coats to get it opaque.

 Step 2 (There's so much we can do)

I took 5 different colours (one for each nail) and using the corner of the brush, blobbed on rough circular blobby shapes. Not very technical I know, but you don't need to be precise when doing this. You are just roughing out the shapes for the roses and provided that they are reasonably round, you're good!

 Step 3 (It's just you for me)

Taking a nail pen in a creamy/nude colour, I roughed in the petals of the roses. Again, it doesn't have to be anything too technical; just rough rose shapes and the effect really comes out.

Step 4 (I can give you more)

Then using another nail pen (I do love them oh so much!), I did some simple green leaves.

 Step 5 (Don't you know that the time has arrived? Which I always thought was Don't you know that the time is right? but Google disagrees with my inner 12 year old's memory.)

I did some clean up with my 100% acetone nail polish remover and a simple (small) paintbrush and then topped it off with a top coat (in this case Colour Club's top coat as I love the seal it gives). And voila! You should have something akin to what's below. If you are interested in getting into nail art at all, I highly recommend picking up some nail pens. They have saved my bacon with detail work on more than one occasion. You could, however, just do the lines using regular nail polish (as that's all that is in the nail pens anyway) and a detail paintbrush.

Unfortunately all my pics came out a little blurry and there didn't seem to be anything I could do to fix that. However, we are heading to the island tomorrow so come Wednesday I should have some clearer pics for you courtesy of my dad's camera.

So I told you what I used for my base but here is what I used for my roses from left to right:

Thumb= Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Coral Reef
Index=NYC Wine Bar
Middle=Sephora by OPI Curve-aceous
Ring=Essie Using My Maiden Name
Pinkie= China Glaze That's Shore Bright

I love this and will be so sad to take it off! I hope the pictorial tutorial helped (and I hope you enjoyed the NKOTB references!). Please let me know if you think I missed out on any information or if anything isn't clear.

FYI: They have discontinued? the Sephora by OPI collection and it is all on 50% off right now on the Sephora website (at least for Canada). I really like this range and have a bunch of the different colours in my collection. I am pretty sure they aren't in their stores any more as they have made way for their new lines but there is a ton of selection online.