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Painting with UV Gel Nail Polish

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I’ve always found resin, painting and the creativity people put into nail art very interesting.  I’ve decided to try and put those things together and paint with UV gel nail polish.  Not on nails, but on a small wood painting panel.

UV Gel polishes are just liquid resin (supposedly a safer version), which I’ve used in my craft room for years.  Normally, I’d add colorants or pigments to clear resin and pour it into molds or paint it onto something, but with polishes they will already have colors mixed in for me.

The added bonus to using gel, and what I’m probably most excited about, is that there is their ability to instantly set.  With a nail lamp, each layer is cured within seconds and you aren’t literally sitting there and watching acrylic paint dry.  And like oil painting, I can pretty much keep playing around with it in a wet form until I decide I’m happy with what I have.

What I used:

 

I started off by googling the largest UV gel polish kits to see how many colors I could get.  The kits I found on Amazon had 100 pcs each and I ordered both, giving me 200 colors to work with.

Before I even had a design in my head, I started off swatching all of the colors.

I got into a rhythm of swatching several colors at a time and pressing them into a chunk of leftover polymer clay at that was sitting on my desk.  This way I could start painting the next round of swatch sticks while they cured under the lamp.

This still took several nights of swatching and listening to YouTube videos.

I had just been labeling them and jamming them back into the box next to their bottle of polish to keep them organized.

It was at this point I realized they were still tacky until a top coat was added, so I had to add top coat to all 200 swatches and cure them again before moving on.  I don’t wear nail polish, I don’t know these things!

Once cured, I organized mine into 4 general categories:

Putting each ring into any type of color order seemed like too much work, but I did clump similar colors together at least.

Grabbing my pencil and rulers, I started doodling.   I wanted to keep this simple because I wasn’t sure if this was going to work out yet.

Recently, I escaped work and took a cruise up to Alaska.  I thought that might be an interesting subject and much different that my usual paintings.

Normally, I would plan every last detail out but I decided to aim for something more whimsical and freeform.

After my first few strokes I came upon my first problem.  The gel polish started spreading through the channels of the wood grain and even seemed to soak in a bit.

Because I did the swatches, I knew it would be 2 layers of painting for most colors to get solid coverage.  Even though I had many nights of swatching, I really hadn’t considered what would happen when I painted on untreated wood.

The polishes came with a of base coat and painted the entire board with it, curing it before moving on.

I went back and gave it a few test swipes of nail polish and this did indeed fix the problems I was having.

I blocked in all my shapes for the first coat curing every so often so I didn’t mess it up.

One down side is that every thing is tacky, even after being under the nail lamp for a bit.  The cured polish also accepted finger prints and dings pretty well too.  I had to keep reminding myself to try and not rest my hand on the painting while working.

I spent time decorating my shapes with dots, lines and swooshes. After pushing around gel for a few more nights I was generally happy with what I made.

Before finishing, I added a little body-shaped smudge off the stern off the cruise ship.  This is where I imagined that I tied a brick to my foot and jumped off the boat so I didn’t have to go back to work.   (Shhhh… it’s our little secret.)

 

I was aiming for whimsy and overall I think I got there (or at least a good first attempt).  The point was to have some fun with it and while it may even verge on childish in places, I decided to leave it alone before I wrecked it.    It could probably be elevated with some details, shadows or redoing some of the line work — but overall I like it.

The last step was to add the top coat.  I carefully took a picture to avoid reflections, but it is GLOSSY.  In person, it’s actually pretty impressive and eye catching with the clear coat added to it.

The funny thing about this project is that I took so much time to swatch out almost 200 colors and ended up using like 4 blues and a yellow to paint the entire thing.

I think I’m going to do a few more paintings about my trip and I will probably keep painting the same style so that it feels like a series.  Maybe, I might even use a few more colors next time (but probably not).  Also, I found some builder gel, so I may try to add some 3D elements to the next paintings with moldable UV gel.

 

Update:

As I had mentioned, I did continue painting events from my trip.  This one is about the lumberjack competition I went to.

 

Update 2:

Another stop during my trip was an observatory.  I made sure to include plenty of glitter throughout this one, though you can’t really see them very well in the picture.

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