Frogs may not be mother nature's most prettiest creature, and they can be pretty repulsive, but we should cherish those little croakers. Frog population is rapidly declining, and we as a humans are responsible for it, as we were responsible for extinction of few other species in last hundred years. Frogs can breed only in unpolluted waters, so they are mother nature indicator of water pollution. Even a small change of pH in the water can create big trouble. There is also rise in 'birth' defect in frog population, and apparently, cause is unknown... hmmm... let's just take a wild guess why. Here I am, turning all geek on you, but, I just hope that future generation will have a pleasure of hearing 'frog song' while camping. That is sound that I always attach to carefree summers, and growing up in marsh land in Croatia, that was common sound. So, in honor of my childhood, here they are - frogs.
When I seen the photo of BC18 stamping plate, frog image was the one that jumped up at me. I purchased this plate just for a frog image. This is best image of frog that I have.
I Imagined this as two frogs sitting on the lily pods, and having a chat. For that,, they needed to be facing each other. Having only one kind of image, I decided to make a decal that would be mirror image (or so). You can do that by stamping one image on the mat, filling it in, put a layer of top coat, then peel and apply on the nail. This is not how I done it. I don't like top coating my decals, as my nails are really curved (front to back and side to side), and flat decal create unpleasant creases that no amount of top coat can hide, I prefer making my decals on stamper head ( we already have slightly curved surface that way), and I skip that extra step of adding top coat. Thing is, I am not good at waiting, and my decal would stretch, or break, or would go crooked or I would have some other kind of mishap... this way, when I am applying it with stamper, I reduce some of those incidence... To do the mirror images on the stamper, I had to figure out which two of my stampers would work together. Then, I just picked up image with one stamper, an stamped it on the other - voila! mirror image for decal making was ready. I purposely omitted some images on one of the decals, to make them slightly different, and I also choose to color frogs slightly differently.
This turned to be just slightly darker than I imagined, but I had to use one of my birthday polishes - Pretty Serious - Frogtown - like I could pass the polish named like this for a frog manicure! Frog town is gorgeous hunter green with silver/pale green shimmer, and is one coater. I also stamped with it - on my pinky, and I am pretty happy to report that it stamped pretty good.
Lighter shade that I used as background for my frogs is LCN - I love mint. To lighten and brighten this manicure, I added some stamping with Kaleidoscope St.16- Green Neon.
All topped with my new top coat - Topped with love by Love, Angeline.