polish please | leopard

I had picked up some more polish at Ulta the other day with the gift card that Mike game me. One of the colors was Zoya Dree, the other was OPI Don't Pretzel my Buttons.

Again, I couldn't wait to use both colors, so I had to use them at the same time. The colors are very reminiscent of camouflage, which I thought about doing, but when surfing the webs I found inspiration on the China Glaze website. This is when I decided to do a leopard mani. I had seen a few that I liked on other sites, and ended up following a tutorial that I found on Chalkboard Nails.

I used my two new colors, China Glaze Liquid Leather, and one of my dotting tools {I used the dotting tool with the smallest points} to create the look. After painting on the base coat and two coats of the base color I added Essie Good to Go fast dry topcoat. The topcoat allows you to work a little quicker, but the mani was a little time consuming. I also practiced on a piece of paper first to work on my shapes, spacing and amount of polish to pick up/ put down with the dotting tool.

I put the contrasting spots on with the larger side of the dotting tool, making random shapes and making sure that they were not perfect. I also made sure to have them "fall off the nail." With the small end if the dotting tool I "framed" the colored spots with black, making sure to have each spot look a little different. I added some extra just black spots in between the colored spots and added more topcoat.