First Ever Dia De Los Muertos nails inspired by soap!

Happy November 2! It's still 85° here, oh happy day! I think today will be our last truly warm day so I have mixed emotions!

Sugar skulls have been popular in the nail world used for nail art for years....I've never really been into that look, partially because I'm not into Halloween that much or skulls of any type. Then when I watched the movie The Book of Life a couple years ago that all changed! It's a beautiful, funny and sweet movie that's not just for kids. It's become one of my favorite movies! After watching that I understood the meaning behind Dia De Los Muertos. Since then I did want to do those designs but I knew there was no way I was doing that without a stamping plate. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when my one and only Halloween plate arrived and there are a few sugar skull designs on it! 

Fast, fast forward to today when I finally got to mess around with them! I didn't really have a plan going in, but this morning I was washing my hands in our downstairs bathroom which has this soap from Bath and Body Works and it hit me! :) Nail inspo is born!



Ghoul Friend is a Halloween soap from BBW, its very sweet scented. I had several textured polishes I wanted to use but the one that came the closest is Cirque Cerrillos, a teal holographic polish that is AMAZING!

I knew I had to dive into making a decal, or reverse stamping I think it's called? I picked out a few colors and dove in. The plate is Pueen Halloween Party 01.



I started with OPI black onyx for the outline and then used a tiny dotting took to fill in. I learned to cover the outline with topcoat too (on the second one I made) because the outline kept coming off on my dotting tool! Ack!



Don't they match so well :)



This is all still my first go...I filled in the skull with Cerrillos and let it dry a bit, then topcoated again. 



I started wondering what it looked like underneath, then I realized DUH, I have a clear stamper (which behaved itself today) and I can just turn it over and see.  

Not too shabby!



Happy with the correlation so far. 



To fill in the skull, I used Zoya Tilda (green), Liv (purple), Brynn (fuchsia), and Dixie (coral). The black is OPI Black Onyx. After the topcoat is dry then you can peel it off the stamper. 



I decided on a white base of Zoya Purity, then laid the decal on over it. I didn't even fit on my super short nails! I turned him a little diagonally, pressed gently down, and trimmed the excess with my nippers. Followed with more topcoat!



Finally ready to start my "for real" decal....got a pretty decent pick up! Better than the first time and pretty good for such a detailed design and regular polish. I was sure to put a layer of topcoat on ;)



I got halfway filling in the second one, trying to be more accurate, and then I realized I should have done the outline in GOLD, not BLACK. Ugh! Duh! So I peeled it off and started over again. The gold I picked is OPI 50 Years of Style, which is a gold chrome-ish polish that stamps pretty well for me. 



On my pinky is Zoya Lorna, one of the new pixie dusts! I slapped on one coat of topcoat to make it shiny. 



Overall I'm pretty happy with these, considering I'm to stamping the equivalent of a person seeing a doctor on tv performing brain surgery and thinking, allright, yup, got it, I can do that ;) I wasn't about to waste my below-average  practice decal so I left him on my thumb. 



Also....I purchased Cirque Cerillos from a destash forever ago and I think this is the first time I've used it! Now I don't want to take it off!