The Beach and May's HPBs' June Link UP

Hello and welcome to my mani for the Hobby Polish Bloggers' June link-up. The theme this month was "The Beach". 

I looked at the stamping plates I had and had Nothing what so ever that even came close to the beach or ocean. And any kind of cute starfish nail charms, nope. I really don't have nail charms. I didn't feel like painting beach balls, palm trees, beach umbrellas or anything like that.

Helen Frankenthaler"s color field paintings have always been among my favorites. It's impossible to get the feeling of a huge canvass on something as small as a nail, but I thought I could go for at least the feeling. So I have my abstract representation of the beach, surf and ocean. 

My decision was to keep the visuals simple and experiment with surfaces as far as texture and reflection.
 

So here were my steps:

1. I first painted all nails with one of my new Juleps. The sky blue is Manda and Manda also has a holo shimmer to her. From the distance it does seem gold but up close you can see the rainbow. 
2. Then came the beach with Pure Ice's Shore Bet.
3. Next up was the surf which is made up of two parts. The white is Zoya's Purity. 
4. With the surf, I played with texture and added free glitter. First, I put down some clear coat, sprinkled on the glitter, patted it down and finally shook it off. The surf is actually a tad higher than anything on my design and being glitter, reflects light.
5. I wanted the water to sparkle like the sun was hitting it. Manda by herself was not going to do this. But add Nfu-Oh 39 and I got my sparkle. 
6. I then turned my attention to the beach. It just didn't look right to me. I wanted texture but wanted it also matte from contrast. 
7. This probably will sound crazy but I put Lynn's Love, Lace and Lilacs on the beach and then matted it out. It took two coats to tame that one. Lynn's polishes just don't like the idea of not shining. 

This was something I could do with both hands. I don't know if people will like this. Hey, I wasn't really sure I liked it when I finished. But wearing it, I decided that, yea, I like it.

I am writing this on Thursday (6/11)and I still have this mani on. I did it Monday and it is wearing like steel. Tomorrow, I will finally take it off. 

So here's the lineup-from left to right:Hard Candy's  Mattly-In-Love, Pure Ice's Shore Bet, Julep's Manda, Zoya's Purity, Lynnderella's Love, Lace and Lilacs, and Nfu-Oh's 39. In frony is sitting the small bottle of glitter that I had previously gotten at Dollar General.

That's it for the mani part. If you made it all the way down here, thanks for hanging in with me. This one was simple but took a while to do because every coat needed to dry. I got a lot of reading done last Monday!

Well, that's it for me this time around. But as I mentioned earlier, I am taking part in The Hobby Polish Blogger's group link-up. This is a great group of bloggers on Facebook that are very supportive and always are willing to give help to other bloggers. So check some of their art out below.

So until next time, take care and shine on! Or I guess matte on or glitter on.

I had to throw in one Helen Frankenthaler painting. 

See you next time.

An InLinkz Link-up