I had no idea what to call this post, I think the stamped pattern is kind of art deco???  These started life as a gradient manicure using China Glaze Sweet Hook, OPI Do You Lilac It and China Glaze Grape Pop.  Not satisified, I then added a coat of my favourite topper polish – Girly Bits Cosmic Ocean, which annoying hardly showed up at all in my lightbox (I have to do something about this…I lose the effect of virtually every shimmer in my lightbox).

So I took another photo under my desk lamp which showed how the sparkle just fine!  I’ve become enough of a fan of my desk lamp lighting that I’ve saved a custom setting on my camera to automatically set it up.  Just got to find some comfortable poses now!

Finally I stamped all my nails using Ulta3 Black Satin using an art deco (maybe) design from Gals plate 34.  This design was a royal pain to stamp with because I just couldn’t get it centred up on my nails.  As you can see the images are a long way too short for my long nails too.  I purposely picked this design because it doesn’t have a solid bottom edge so combined with the gradient it looks intentional, but I would far rather have a design that covers my whole nail.

I really liked the finished effect, even if I did blur some of my nails with my top coat.  It was really striking and reminded me why I like stamping with black polish.  I tend to avoid it because the Konad black polish is such an awful polish to clean up afterwards but now I know that my Ulta3 black polish has thickened up perfectly for stamping I foresee a lot more black stamping in my near future!