ModCloth Nail Klub Nail Art Challenge

I was pleasantly surprised when I received an email last Wednesday from ModCloth, asking me to participate in their Nail Klub nail art challenge.  The challenge is to create a nail art look inspired by one of their many dresses.  One of their many, many, many dresses.  So many dresses!  It took me a while to narrow it down.  I started a Pinterest board just to try to keep track of all the ones that sparked an idea for nail art.  In the end though, I kept coming back to a dress called In the Key of Chic Dress in Polka Dots.

To mimic the design of the dress, I started out with 2 coats of Milani White On The Spot.  Once dry, I sponged a gradient onto Bundle Monster plate BM-018, using OPI Red Hot Rio, OPI I Just Can't Cope-acabana, and OPI Ogre-The-Top Blue, which I then scraped and stamped onto my nails.  One of the things I really loved about this dress was the way the colors were blended throughout the dots.  In the smaller thumbnail image, it looks like just solid dots of red, yellow, and blue.  But if you view the enlarged photo of the dress on the ModCloth site, you can see that the colors sometimes mix with each other, creating some dots with streaks of several colors and even blending to create some orange and green tones.

My original plan for this whole design was actually to start off with a gradient base, rather than white.  Then stamp on white polish with a design from BM-423, which would leave dots of the gradient underneath peeking through.  The gradient itself was looking pretty awesome.  But with the stamp applied, not so much.  The dots just didn't pop on the nail the way they did on the dress and the white borders were too thick.  So then I decided to reverse it and stamp with a gradient instead.  I've stamped with multiple colors at once before, and ended up with some blending in the final result.  But I wanted to make sure I'd get much more of a gradient effect this time.  So rather than just placing blobs of polish next to each other on the plate and hoping they would blend a little when scraped, I sponged the gradient onto the plate just like I would onto my nails.  And I was extremely happy with the results!

I repeated the stamp on all my nails and then top coated with Seche Vite to seal it in.

Ideally, I would have loved to have added some type of bright blue accent for the blue bow wrapped around the waist of the dress.  And believe me I tried.  Multiple times.  In the process, I confirmed that I can't free hand a bow to save my life, lol.  I tried stamping a few different bow designs, but none of them looked right or were just not opaque enough.  I even went so far as to attempt both a ruffian design and framed nails to try and incorporate the bright blue of the bow.  When all that fell flat, I decided to just stick with what worked.  So I finally left my little polka dots alone, and I think they look great all by themselves.  There's 52 other dresses from ModCloth still on my Pinterest board (now you can understand my need to organize them!), so if I'm ever stuck for nail art inspiration in the future, that'll probably be the first place I turn to.