How To Make Your Own Nail Decals Tutorial

Tonight I tried a new technique I recently came across on nailnerd.com and then also on messymansion.com.au and beaching nails. - How to create your own nail decals!
This is where you pre-prepare a design for your nails on a plastic sheet or baking/wax paper, and then transfer it to your nails.

There's so many pros about this technique I'll have to make a list!

• I find it much easier painting onto a sandwich bag or baking paper than it is painting onto my nails...
• Probably because you don't have to paint with your non-dominant hand!
• If you make a mistake/don't like the colour you used/decide on something better- its ok! - just try again.... you don't have to remove all your polish and start from the beginning.
• Can pre-paint/prepare nail art for use when you don't have much time.
• I've actually never used a nail decal.... but these seem to work well, being made completely of nail polish, as they kind of dissolve onto your nails when you add top coat.

This technique is also awesome for stamping nail art (I used it for this).
Pros:

• All of the above...

• You can colour in the stamping designs!!!! I'd always wanted to do this but colouring them in  on the nail just covers the lines up unless your a super-human. (see the tutorial to see how this works.... when you flip the decal over even if you make a huge colouring-in fail mess it turns out perfect on the other side!)
• You can cut out a specific part of a stamp design if you don't want to use the whole thing. Yes you can also do this by quickly removing parts of the design on the stamper with acetone on a q-tip, but I'm never fast enough and the polish dries. 
• If you are using a stamp design that needs to be centered on the nail, or in a specific spot on the nail (ie so all the nails are the same) this technique makes it easy :) 
• This also applies for non full nail stamps, where you want the design to be on the same place of each nail.

The only disadvantage I found was that sometimes the design won't sit flat and requires extra top coat meaning it can be a little thick.

Anyway, here is the tutorial I made for making your own stamping nail decal. You would do the same for hand painted designs minus the stamping (obviously :P  ):



Since making this tutorial I have also tried using baking paper instead of a sandwich bag. The decals slide off the wax paper much easier than they did off the plastic so if you are having trouble removing your decals from the plastic try baking paper instead. The only downside is that they actually slide off too easily.... and if part of the decal is still drying (ie a part you have coloured in) the wet part sticks to the wax paper and the rest detaches, ruining the decal.
I have also experimented with stamping directly onto the plastic/baking paper, and then adding the top coat over the top (thinking this would mean I didn't have to line up the stamp over my clear polish), but it smeared really easily. I think that without body warmth it takes much longer to dry completely, or just gets smeared easily without a base... not sure why, but working over a pre-painted clear base seems to be the best way to go for me.

Something I have found to hep in the application to your nail is to wait for your top coat to partially dry and become tacky (only 20 seconds approx with seche vite) before applying the decal. This way it will stick rather than slide around :)


As I said above you can pre-prepare these decals for later use. Here are some I have stockpiled:

And here are some more pictures of my home made feather nail decal mani!

The polishes used in the sponge gradient are

• China Glaze Sunset Sail (lightest)
• Revitanail Barely There (Middle shade nude)
• Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Mocha Mix (reddy purply browny colour)

The feathers are stamped from GA38 (gals fairy series) with konad dark brown special polish

The feathers were painted with Mocha Mix and Barely There. 

Update!!!
I noticed I'm getting a lot of traffic to this page, so clearly people are interested in this technique!... So I thought I'd post other manis I have done using home made decals :)

For this manicure, the ring finger feature nail was done with a decal. I tried stamping directly onto the nail a few times but couldn't get it centered (which I can't stand!). So I stamped it onto plastic (over seche) and then applied it exactly where I wanted it :) 

More pictures and details on polishes used here

Once again.... tried about 3 times to stamp that darn Eiffel Tower in the centre of the nail, failed, ruined the base colours with polish remover .....and then made a decal. Much easier!

More details on this manicure and a picture of it in front of the Eiffel Tower can be found here. 

For these butterflies I used a paper punch on the decals. Tutorial and more info here

And here is the pièce de résistance! Floral decals make using MoYou London pro plate 06. More details here. These are by far my best decals that I have made so far!

 

These were made with MoYou explorer plate 03 whuch has great designs for this technique! See the full post here .

Thanks for stopping by!!!