Brass Patina Nails - A Near-Foolproof Technique

Look, I meant to make a post about nail polish. Then somehow an essay happened. If you want to see nails then go ahead to the part with pictures.  If you want to read my rambling train of thought in getting there, I guess I'm not deleting it... yet. Knock yourself out.

As you may have noticed if you've been attempting to follow this blog, one of the few subjects that you can expect me to post about with any regularity is Halloween. I love Halloween, but more specifically I love costumes. Recently I've been thinking that if I could get a masters degree in anything, I would probably want to get it in a combination of stage makeup and costuming, as well as fashion design and perhaps some very understated performance art. I would get my master's in disguise. 

This is somewhat inspired by last year's costume (she said, linking to her own blog as if she'd made more than two posts in the nearly ten months since then...) as well as Ru Paul's Drag Race, and waaay too much time spent locked away in my room playing Dress Up as a kid. This year I hope to pull off David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, which will be my first attempt at drag. Admittedly he's not the most... genderful character, but whatever. You gotta start somewhere right?

Anyway, right now I'm learning to be a girl. I'm female, sure, but you know. Makeup and stuff. I never really learned it. I'm drawn to nail polish because I'm a little more familiar with it, having gone through a phase in the 4th and 5th grade. I got pretty good at applying it at the time it seemed, but as it turns out 10-year-olds have pretty low standards. Apparently a second coat is basically mandatory, as is a topcoat. Oh, and there are primers too I guess, though I have no intention of delving into any more layers than I already have to contend with. It is madness. Sheer madness.

All of this means that now I suck at nails. All of the layers means more drying time, and now that I'm an adult I actually have things that I have to do with my time. I can't just not use my hands for that long! It seems like each coat is always too thick or too thin or not smooth, or if I somehow manage to get it just right and hold perfectly still for like an hour, it turns out that my nails are STILL tacky, and end up with weird indentations.

So, getting to the damn point, I wanted to figure out a technique that would use my weaknesses to my advantage. This is something I learned while studying sculpture which may seem a bit bullshitty, but is actually invaluable. When you're learning a craft, you generally suck at it in the beginning. And then if you try hard you get mediocre for a long time. It's very easy to get frustrated and give up (and trust me, I've given up or set aside a few dozen skill sets) but if you can find a way to work with the things you're doing wrong instead of trying to get around them, you sometimes end up with a result which is more satisfying than just settling for churning out crap until you improve.

I picked up a couple of new polish colors last weekend, and they reminded me of copper and brass. I used to work with soft metals a fair amount, and loved the variations in patina that could be given to copper, brass and bronze. I don't have any polish that's really bronze colored, so I decided to go for a brass patina look.

Cast Bronze Patinas, from http://www.acssigns.com

If I do this again, I'll have to get a bronze polish and try to recreate specific patinas. If you ever get into it, The Colouring, Bronzing and Patination of Metals is incredibly fun to page through as well as being extremely useful. 

Left to right: L.A. Colors Wavelength, L.A. Colors Fiery Orange, Sinful Colors Gorgeous, Sally Hansen Lightning Frost, NYC Matte Me Crazy - a wonderful product with an incredibly stupid name.

A sponge was involved.

Well, 1/8 of a sponge was involved.

Nevermind the map - it was on the wall that proved easiest to photograph my own hands on. It required some timer trickery and probably too much trust in autofocus...

Step 1: I applied a thin layer of one of the first three colors to each nail and let it dry completely.

Step 2: Using a scrubber-free edge of a sponge bit (if you want to try this out, get it a little bit damp beforehand - I found that having it completely dry didn't work at all well and it's hard to arrange wetting it while you have fresh polish on) I lightly pressed a light, textured layer of first Gorgeous (blue) and then Fiery Orange. I was going for more of the appearance of flecking rather than too much 3D texture. I found that if I was too heavy handed I got too 3D, or else wore away the thin basecoat. I found it worked best to dab just once or twice, and only over small areas of the nail. I didn't put both fleck colors on every nail. Some I left almost fleck free, others got really loaded up. I just wanted irregularity and multiple colors on each nail! Again, I let my nails dry completely.

Step 3: I used the Lightning Frost, which is a really sheer silver to do some damage control. I filled in the thin spots I'd made by accident and smoothed out the more textured bits. Matte topcoat (we'll get to that later) doesn't like bumps, though I've found it mostly only matters with black or really dark colors. I didn't do a full coat with the silver - just the spots that needed it, and a few that didn't to be really consistently irregular. Then I let my nails dry, yet again. I'm not sure it was as complete this time though...

Step 4: I went back in with Wavelength (brass) to create the effect of the underlying metal. When you patina metal, you can rub away the patina from the high points allowing the underlying metal to show through in relatively smooth areas, which creates a nice contrast with the patina hiding in the crevasses. That doesn't really work with nail polish, so I did it backwards and put the brass on top of the "patina" in select areas. This polish is way thicker than the silver, so I had to be a little more careful with it. At this point I waited for hours so that my nails would be truly dry, as the topcoat is the step where you can actually mess this manicure up.

Almost done! Just needs matte topcoat!

I'm particularly fond of this nail, though I had to doctor the photo to get the blue to show up.

Lefty, pre-topcoat.

 Step 5: I applied one layer of matte topcoat (I'm not writing the name again) and BAM!  Suddenly the colors are all blending and slightly frosted and oh-so-satiny-nice. This topcoat doesn't fully matte metallics, but I love what it does to them.

After matte topcoat and shower.

Lefty post-topcoat.

And the result is.... I'm quite pleased! I will definitely be playing with this some more and getting more heavily into the bounty of patina geekiness. I even enjoyed doing it, which is kind of the point.