the great wave

today's manicure is a shout-out to my home country (and the niftiest country in the whole world!)- JAPAN:

2 coats sinful neptune stamped with mash plate 49 (with sinful snow me white)

this plate (49) was one of the main reasons i bought this bundle of mash plates. i just love the asian-looking waves. it reminds me so much of the great wave over kanagawa. you know that famous print, right? if not, then google it right now! coincidentally, i have a print of this famous work hanging up in my living room, and decided to take a picture of my nails with it.

i just love this! i love the effect on my nails, and i mostly love the fact that it seems i'm getting better at stamping! finally! wanna know what i did differently?

~from watching various how-tos and youtube videos, i discovered that i wasn't scraping hard enough. that's why i kept getting polish in places on the image where it shouldn't be. see this mani. so this time, i scraped with more pressure, and even scraped twice when it still looked blurry.

~i also tried picking up the image by stamping onto the plate from straight above, not rolling it onto the plate. i wasn't even aware that i did this until just recently! i think it's made a big difference with smudging. just look at my eyeball manicure i did only about a week and a half ago and look at all the blurriness going on! i call that improvement, friends.

~lastly, i tried stamping the image onto my nails with more pressure. i think i was using too light of a touch before, which of course results in not all of the image being transferred. 

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so what do you think? has it gotten better? and do you have any other tips for me to improve my stamping even more?