Sunday Surprise - Challenge Accepted!

A post on Sunday? What could this be? Well my eager little beavers, I shall tell you. It's a summer nail challenge! A while ago the lovely Esme from Nail Addict (and also the beauty blog A Beauty Addict's Diary) emailed me about doing a summer nail challenge all about gradients. Check out this awesome (gradient colored, of course) banner Esme made with the schedule!

Okay so before I show you my day one nails, I want to give a huuuuuge thank you to Esme because I was a total loser and did like zero of the planning for this. I was lame and packing boxes and she totally did everything, so thanks for all your work!! <3 You are awesome!

Are we ready for some gradients? I am! Let the challenge begin!

No my camera isn't adding spots, that is a stray piece of glitter hanging out on my palm >.< 

Polishes used:

• Seche Rebuild base coat / Seche Vite top coat
• Essie Master Plan
• Essie Blanc
• Sally Hansen Black Heart
• Red Angel stamping plates RA-114 and RA-110

Why hearts for the black and white day you may ask? Today happens to be my wedding anniversary! Yay us for eight years! (Dude that made me feel so old >.<) Anyway, for this look I tried gradient stamping with meh results. I think I need practice and some not so contrasted colors. I put a stripe of black and a stripe of white on the image plate and used the scraper so one color pulled into the other, if that makes sense. I tried black into the white first and that just didn't go over well at all, so I switched to the white first and that worked out much better. Lesson learned, pull from light to dark! For the accent nail I did a black/white gradient and stamped with plain white. I originally wanted to stamp with Master Plan but the gray just didn't want to show. Up close you can see my topcoat smudges and whatnot but from normal arm length it looks pretty decent and gradient-ed. Gradated? Gradient-y? I just stopped typing for a minute to google and it is indeed gradated. (Grammar lesson, y'all!) Overall I love how these turned out, kinda sad I will only be sporting them for a day because tomorrow is day two of the challenge wheeeee! 

Before you leave: Go see what Esme came up with for day one of the summer gradient challenge! (Yes, I really did have to make a link out of an entire sentence :P) See you all tomorrow!