Dream of the Blue Turtleshells

Hello, Fireflies!

Do you like brown polish?  Does it change your mind if it's bronze?  Check out Finger Paints Bronze Sculpture. 

That reddish-gold shimmer just makes this polish glow.  I seriously dig it.

I saw Raggio di Luna's Red Tortoiseshell nail art and I just absolutely loved it.  She has the perfect nail shape to totally pull it off, too.  I thought I'd give it a try with some different colors.  It's a terrible picture, but I wanted to give you some idea how I created the spacing and the shapes.

I'm so used to creating nail art by applying polish where I want the detail to go - it's a lot harder to create negative space - in this case, filling up almost all the space with blue and letting parts of the brown show through. I did have to cheat and touch up a little here and there, but overall, the brown is from the base coat.

Topcoat really helps to smooth out all the brush strokes and help the shimmer from the bronze show through.  Do you think they look like turtle shells?

Bottle shot:  Finger Paints Bronze Sculpture, and LA Splash Ocean Splash.

I've created some nail art with tape that uses the negative space, but this is one of the few times I've painted over almost all the nail and left just the outline behind.  Maybe it would have been easier to paint the blue first and then paint in the brown, but I don't think it would look as organic.  How would you do it?