Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Rubik's Cube Nails

Happy Tuesday, everyone! I hope you're all having a wonderful week - I know I am! Our terribly unpredictable Illinois weather has FINALLY given us true summer temperatures. Time for tanning and the pool! But of course, I can't go outside without my nails painted... as they say, "you're never fully dressed without a manicure!" Today I have for you a slightly dorky, yet extremely easy tutorial: Rubik's Cube nails!


You will need: 
- base coat
- black striper
- dotting tool
- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and white polish
- top coat

The first thing you're going to want to do is gather your polishes. This one uses a bunch, and it's better to have them on hand at the beginning then have to go hunting for them in the middle of your manicure. The colors on a Rubik's Cube are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and white; I'd suggest getting a cube on hand to compare your colors to, but if you don't have a Rubik's cube or can't find a perfectly accurate color, that's okay. No one will notice! 
Paint on a base coat and then use the black striper to seperate each nail into nine squares. The lines don't have to be perfect - you'll cover them up later. 

Stripe Rite - Black

And now the fun (and time-consuming) part. Grab your colors, pick up your dotting tool, and fill'er in! The pattern is completely up to you - I made mine pretty random. Being the perfectionist I am, I did put a little thought into the colors: Since there are six colors, that's three left over spots on each nail, which total to 12 extra spots if you're not counting the thumb. Divide that by six, and that's two extra spots for each color. So I painted each color once on each nail, and then one extra time on two of the nails (if that made any sense!).
Don't worry about filling the squares in perfectly for now! We'll fix everything later.

Kiss Colors - True Red

Once you've used every color, your nails should look something like this. And since it's probably not going to fit in the caption, the colors I used are:
Orange: Sally Hansen - Sun Kissed
Yellow: Sally Hansen - Lightening
Green: China Glaze - Four Leaf Clover
Blue: Sinful Colors - Endless Blue
White: China Glaze - White on White


Gently add a top coat to smooth your nails out for the next step. Be light to make sure you don't smear any of the colors, or wait until it's all dry!

Seche Vite

Now to make them actually look like Rubik's Cubes! Using a black striper (and yes, I used a different striper than I did for the first step. I'm not really sure why.), go over the black lines again. You'll want these ones to be as clean and straight as possible.

Art Deco - Black

And then all there is left is cleanup and a top coat!


And some extra angle shots, because I can never take just one picture.



That's it! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. These are a teensy bit time consuming, but totally worth it. 

Oh, yeah, what do you all think of the new blog layout? I was only intending to change the background color, but I got a bit carried away, and ended up changing... a lot. Let me know what you think of it! I added some nifty social network buttons on the side, too, so all you have to do now is click those to take you to Facebook, Twitter, or wherever you want to go. You can also automatically pin my pictures to Pinterest now - just hover over the picture you want and the button should show up.

That's all for now! Comment below what you think of the tutorial, and the new blog design. I love hearing from all of you! 

5 comments:

  1. Wow so pretty! That looks like it took a long to do ! Great job!

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    Replies
    1. Thank you so much! I think it felt like it took longer than it actually did just because filling in squares got a bit boring after a while, but it was definitely worth it :)

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  2. gotta give this one a go, looks great and brings back memories :) xo oh and sunshine! jealous! its winter here

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