Sailor Mercury Themed Nails!

Because I'm going to a wedding tomorrow, I wanted to redo my nails so they look good for it. My old nails were chipping pretty badly so it was time for new nails anyways. A week ago, I finally got my new nail embellishments!! Silver hollow nail bows!! They're so damn cute! I also wanted to do a blue color and thought it would be great if I could use my new blue nail polish that has pink iridescent glitter!! The color of fairytales. I used this chance to look up some nail designs on Pinterest and wanted to use something with negative space. I've been into negative space nails lately. I found one where it had negative space as a big strip horizontally across a nail with lace behind it. I took this idea and expanded on it. I wanted to do alternate designs, so two nails use the middle hollow negative space and other two nails has a lace background with blue tips (it gives it a nice design that would look good with the silver hollow bows). The middle nail, I wanted to make as a solid colored nail, an accent nail. I took this chance to use my new Sailor Moon nail art stamp plate!! Because it's going to be blue themed, I had three choices, I can do Sailor Moon, Sailor Mercury or Sailor Neptune. Sailor Neptune is a but more on the turquoise/teal side and the stamp plate didn't have her symbol! So it was either Sailor Moon or Sailor Mercury. We've been having wet weather lately, all his snow, so I figured, hell, I'm going to do Sailor Mercury! She's my top favorite scout and she doesn't get enough attention.

Original nail idea:

The nails I came up with:

This design is pretty simple. It did take time but it's not hard to do at all. I painted the middle finger with light blue nail polish, two coats, then did a coat of the light blue with pink glitter. All of the other nails, I stamped with lace white designs on the whole nail. I then painted a clear top coat over it so seal in the designs because I will be working with tape and french nail stickers. The next step, you might've guessed, was to tape off a strip in the middle and then apply the french tip stickers to the other two nails. Painted the uncovered parts and tips with my light blue nail polish with two coats then topped it off with the light blue polish with pink glitter. Afterwards, I thought it looked too plain so I painted white stripes on the edges of the negative space. After that, I thought the nails with the tips looked too plain and dotted the edges of the tips to resemble pearls. ....I still thought the nails with the negative space was too plain so I stamped some lace borders on the stripes.
So now that I was satisfied with all of the nails, I can work on the middle one. I used my nail art stamp plate to get the Sailor Mercury star with her symbol in the middle of it. I kept the design on the rubber applicator and scraped off any access designs that I didn't want (the designs are really close together on the plate). I then filled in the star with yellow nail polish and made sure it was thick so that way it's not transparent to where if I were to apply it, you could see through the yellow so it would turn green from the blue paint underneath. After that was done and dry, I applied clear polish on top of the design and peeled it off the stamper. I didn't apply clear polish to my nail before applying the design because I'm nitpicky, so I would've messed up the design by trying to get it perfect on the nail before the paint dries. I just applied clear paint ontop and that dissolved the clear polish on the design. It came out flawless.
For the embellishments, I took a nail polish remover pen and took off the center polishes on my thumb nail so when I apply the nail glue and bow, it will really stick to my nail good. I tried glue and embellishments on top of nail polish before and it easily came off from everyday wear. I applied the nail glue and bow then extra glue on the bottom and top sides of the middle of the bow. For the middle nail, I applied light blue and light pink rhinestones. With these, I applied top clear polish and positioned the gems on top then sealed them off with about 2-3 layers to clear top coat to keep it from coming off. I like to be super thorough with embellishments because I have horrible luck with them. They always come off. I don't live a rough, hard life but for some reason, my hands seem to think so.