First Attempt at Stamping Decals!

Hi guys. I'm sorry I've been such a bad blogger lately! I don't really have any good excuses haha, except it was my birthday, and then fiance's graduation from the police academy and his family visited, and then I had a birthday re-do because the first one sucked! And tomorrow it's fiance's birthday! December is always so busy, it seems. Luckily, I have a fair amount of posts from the vault that I still need to share, so I have one of those for you today. 

This was my first ever attempt at stamping decals!

I did these nails last spring back when I had my talons. I had just received some MoYou stamping plates and I wanted to play with them while trying out this technique I had seen on chichicho's blog post. It was super easy to follow her instructions, and you end up getting vibrant, multicolored stamps with hardly any effort and no worries about placement or whether the stamp will transfer the way you want it to! :)

I started with a base of OPI Did You Ear About Van Gogh (seriously, these puns - my goodness) to give me a neutral sort of canvas for the decals. I wanted the bright colors to really stand out! Then, I followed the tutorial I mentioned from chichicho. I'm not going to go into great detail about it here, because it wasn't my tutorial - if you want to try it out, click here for the original post that I followed. You should end up with little decals that look something like this once you peel it off your stamper! I smeared this one a bit when I topcoated it on the stamper. :/

The MoYou plates (I used Scholar plate here) have larger images, which is usually great for stamping, but it does add an extra step in that you'll need to trim these down before trying to place them on your nail. I did a layer of a slow-drying topcoat and then just stuck the images on. You can add another layer of topcoat overtop of your placed images if you want to. I thought it helped with hiding the lines from around the decals.

So what do you think? For my first time, I thought it could have been worse! Definitely some aspects need work, but it will get better with practice. I think this technique really is perfect for those who aren't great at getting crisp, clean stamping transfers (ME!) or who want to add a pop of color to their stamping designs. I think it's such a fun idea, and I can't wait to get better at it so that I can try more difficult designs. :)

Thanks for reading!
<3 Kelly