FingerFood's Theme Buffet - Rainbow (with tutorial)

Hiya lovelies!  As promised, I'm back today with my Theme Buffet mani for this week.  The prompt is rainbow, so I did some simple rainbow stripes.  I've put together a tutorial for this design as well - it's not particularly complex or anything, but I figured it would be good practise for me to do one anyway.............

So, without further ado, shall we get to it?

You will need:

Nail polishes in white, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue and green.  I chose neons, but you could use a normal rainbow set if you prefer.  You will need the complete set though, as the colours will be going in a specific order, that goes around in a continuous loop.  I hope that makes sense, but if it doesn't, don't worry, you'll see what I mean when we get to that step. :)  You will also need, a top coat and base coat (not pictured), as well as some striping tape and a fine nail art brush.  You could probably use a dotting tool in a pinch, but your stripes probably won't be all wishy washy like mine are.

I've put together a little pictorial as well as the full step by step below it, since I know a lot of you may not need a full explanation............

1. I started by painting my nails white. You'll want this to be completely opaque, as a lot of the white will still be on show.  Then I left it to dry completely before moving on to the next step.  You can speed this process up by applying a quick dry top coat.  I wouldn't use quick dry drops/sprays though, as they can leave behind a greasy film.

2. Once my base was dry, I applied striping tape to my nails in one direction only.  Try and make sure you leave a fairly even gap between each piece, about the same width as the tape, and make sure your tape is all stuck down nice and firmly.  I also find it helpful to trim the excess tape quite short near my tips, and leave a longer end near the cuticle so I can grab hold of it later on.

3. Now we're all taped up, we are going to get our first colour of polish (it doesn't matter which one, but I tend to choose my favourite, so I can be sure that there will be at least one stripe of that colour on each nail) Then, using our fine nail art brush, we're going to carefully fill in one random stripe on each nail.  Since I wanted my neons to be a bit brighter than the bottle colour, I applied it very thinly and didn't go over it a second time, but if you wanted a solid colour you may want to do a second coat.  Make sure to clean your brush and let it dry before moving on to the next step/colour.

4. Now we're going to take the next colour in the rainbow (pink for me, but if you started with blue, you would chose either purple or green next), and fill in the next white stripe, just below the purple.  Once you've filled that in, remove only the one piece of tape that's between the 2 stripes we've already coloured in.  Take your time, and make sure you pull the right one off, as if you have to replace a piece of tape you will need to wait until your polish is all dry.

5. So, the next colour in my sequence is orange, so I've filled in my next set of stripes.  On the index finger, I've removed the tape separating the pink and orange, but on the middle and pinkie finger, I've left the tape on, so you guys can see.
You may have also noticed that on my ring finger, the pink was the last stripe, so I've worked out where the orange stripe should be, and filled that one in. If you're worried about filling the wrong one in, you can always leave that nail until last though.

6. Next up is yellow, so I filled in any stripe that was directly below an orange stripe, and remove the piece of tape separating the orange and yellow stripes.

7. The next colour is green, so I filled in any stripe directly below a yellow.  Now, on this step I messed up.  If you look on the pinkie nail, I've pulled off the tape on both sides of the green stripe, not just the one between the green and yellow.  Since this was the last piece of tape on that nail. I ended up fixing that by just carefully freehanding the missing stripe with a skinny striping brush.  If it had been further up the nail, I wouldn't trust my freehand, so I would have waited until it was dry to replace the tape and add the final stripe.

8. Now it's time to add the last colour in our rainbow - blue. As you can see, I was still left with a few empty stripes afterwards, so I filled them in too, checking the other nails to figure out which colours they should be.

9. And of course, added in the missing blue stripe on the pinkie nail.  It's a bit wonky, but as it's a tiny stripe it's not too obvious :)
So, all that's left to do now is wait for it to dry, add a top coat, and clean up around the edges......

And there it is!  It's definitely a simple concept, but, as I proved it's easy to get a bit muddled, so you really need to be paying attention to what you're doing.  Pulling off the wrong piece of tape is annoying, but ultimately something you can work around - however, if I'd painted a stripe the wrong colour it would be a lot harder to fix.
If you're confident with your diagonal stripe painting skills, you could probably freehand this easily enough, but sometimes I just crave the clean cut striping tape lines.  I may attempt this freehand with a different colour palette though, as I think it would be cool to compare the 2 side by side.

So, that's all from me today lovelies.  I'll be back tomorrow with either my Colour me Crazy mani for this week, or some swatches, I haven't quite decided yet :D  In the meantime, you guys can check out a whole bunch of rainbow heaven if you mosey on down to the thumbnails below, and since it's Friday, the Free Friday Mosh below those.

An InLinkz Link-up

So, first up is Scar the Martyr.  If you've not heard of them, they're the band formed by Joey Jordison after his departure from Slipknot.  Unfortunately, they've now parted ways with their vocalist, Henry Derek, which is a shame since I loved his vocals.  Still, I'm excited to see who their new vocalist will be so that's something.....

And how about some older Deftones. I did want to use Passenger, but alas, I couldn't find a video for it that was actually uploaded by the copyright holder, so you guys will have to look it up yourselves if you want to.  (you should though :p)