Nail Art: The Importance of Grid

I'm slowly getting back into nail art. It's sort of like a bug, you get it in bursts. Anyway, about the title. At university we've been working on a brief for creating our own wallpaper and we've all been learning about how important a grid is in setting up a recurring pattern.

I'm not sure if you remember this dress from another post or not, but it's what I wanted to wear for my final presentation along with some pretty nails.

I wanted to mimic the pattern and colour from the dress so I quickly painted up a few ideas I had. The colours used here are OPI Roadhouse Blues (navy), OPI Skull and Glossbones (grey) and China Glaze Dress to Kill (red, love that name btw).

I really loved how graphic the first nail looked with the navy flowers on the grey base. The second nail I also loved, the third was ok but wasn't as strong or bold as the first two. The last nail was pretty blah. I decided to go with both the first and second nails!

Here is where the grid comes in! Keep in mind that I did do my left hand first and didn't use a grid. Total mess. I do recommend getting some practice in before going straight into this lol. I really liked how the design looked at this stage. I may just have to have this as a mani on it's own one day.

Now Roadhouse Blues gets covered in Skull and Glossbones. I was a bit iffy about this because the grey looks quite a bit softer over the navy. I'll have to make that bit work better I think.

All finished! I think this was before I put top coat on. Because after I did it sort of smudged bits of the navy out and streaked. It wasn't major or overly obvious, but I knew it was there! >:( I used Essie 3-way Glaze for the top coat. Usually it serves me well, but not today...

An "in the shade" pic just for good measure. 


To do all of this I just used the flat end of a dressmakers pin. I desperately searched my apartment for a dotting tool and only found toothpicks. I've had bad experiences when using toothpicks for nail art and I found a rogue pin in my couch so I decided to use that.

Here is also a picture of my cat.