Nail Art Wednesday: Somber Dots and Stripes

After coming up with that busy design last week, I decided to go back to simple and understated. I was reading up on fashion trends and noticed a prevalence of print mixing. Brights and florals are also supposed to be huge (but aren't they ALWAYS huge during spring?) but what caught my eye was mixing patterns. Stripes, plaid, floral, paisley... Apparently, the rules aren't as strict as they once were. You can now mix patterns to your heart's content, provided you do it in a way that doesn't make you look like a clown on the run. Now, there's the tricky part. I wanted to see if I could do just that with my nails and decided on keeping it all grounded by using only two colors and two patterns. The color combination I chose was inspired by an art print that my dad in law left behind (it didn't fit in his luggage). Besides, it felt strangely appropriate with the icky weather we had over the weekend (wasn't that wind on Saturday insane?). As for the patterns, I've been wanting to do polka dots ever since I saw G's take on them at Nouveau Cheap and stripes seemed easy enough to freehand. This is what I came up with:

Hammie says: Dotty and stripey!

What I Used:
Pale blue: Orly Snowcone
Grey: Nina Ultra Pro Ink-ling
Dotting tool (I used the blunt end of a bamboo kebab skewer)
Detail paint brush (I got mine from a detail brush set at WalMart in the Crafts section)

How I Did It:
After I applied my base coat, I applied the base colors. For this design, I used the grey on the accent nails: ring and thumb. The rest I painted in the pale blue shade:

Then, I did this:

And ended up with this:

I liked how easy this was to do and yet how fun it came out even with the somber color combination I used. I have to admit though, I had to re-do the ring finger 3 times just because I wasn't happy with the stripes I did (my perfectionist streak was making itself known, haha!). For some reason, getting the thumb just right was so easy, having the stripes all nice and straight in just one go. There wasn't any secret to getting it all straight and evenly spaced. It really was just me eyeballing it and trying to keep as steady a hand as possible while painting on the stripes. But I think it does help if you work fast and do it in one swipe instead of going at it slowly. On the other hand, the dots came out a lot bigger than I was hoping for but that only meant I needed less of them, so that worked out in the end. I had so much fun doing the dots that I can see myself doing more designs using dots in the future, for sure!

The Elvis print that inspired the color combination.

Excuse the weird smaller dot on the index. 

It had too much space but I should've done part of a dot instead of the whole thing.

Against a white background for better contrast.

With one of my favorite scarves from Simons that I got when I was last in Montreal.

Happy Hump Day! This week is going by slower than I'm hoping for. The blaaaah weather isn't helping either. Can we just fast forward to summer already? How do you feel about polka dots making a comeback? Are you a fan of mixing patterns? What colors do you gravitate towards to get rid of winter blahs?