Colorful chevron nail art inspired by C9 by Champion ad in SELF magazine

I enter many contests to get free magazine subscriptions, mainly to look at the ads, because I get so many ideas from them. The July 2014 issue of SELF magazine was filled with inspiring pictures. Based primarily on the ads plus a few pictures from real content, I came up with 15 sketches of designs I’d be interested in trying. Today’s design was inspired by a C9 by Champion ad seen on page 48 (apparently this was a very inspiring ad for me, I got 3 designs out of the same page. You’ll see the other two on this blog soon).

What I used:

• base coat (not shown)
• sheer beige (unnamed, no number) by Kiss Colors (part of French mani kit)
• silver (C96RF1) by Sally Hanson (unnamed, from French mani set)
• Black (71806-15) by e.l.f. (part of Necessary Nails collection)
• quick dry top coat (optional, and not shown)
• Modern Art (844) by Rimmel London
• Neon Pink (20) by KleanColor
• Metallic Green (416A) by Wet n Wild
• Mint Green (NA911) by LA Colors (Art Deco collection)
• Golden nylon 10/0 American Painter paintbrush
• matte top coat (not shown)

That’s a long list! I used several colors to mix to get as close to the colors in the ad as I could. If you didn’t want to duplicate the colors exactly, or if you own colors that are exactly like the ad, it would be far fewer polishes. The fewest needed would be 4 colors (gray, orange, pink, green) plus base coat and matte top coat.

What I did:

Step 1: Base coat. When dry, use your gray polish (or mix beige, silver, and black to get gray). Apply 1-2 coats with the paintbrush, let dry. Clean the paintbrush.

Step 2: (Optional, but it makes your life easier if you’re not great at freehand designs) Apply 1 coat of quick dry top coat. This allows you to use a little nail polish remover to remove just the stripes if you mess them up, without removing the base color.

Step 3: Use an opaque orange (mine is sheer, so I have to mix it with something else to get it to show up over other colors. I mixed the orange with a small drop of silver) and add a chevron stripe with the paintbrush, clean brush (The color I used looks more yellow in the pictures, but it was a little more orange in real life).

Step 4: Leaving a space as wide as the first stripe, add a second stripe with the paintbrush, this time in pink, then clean brush.

Step 5: Repeat Step 4 using your green (or mix Metallic Green with Mint Green).

Step 6: Repeat Step 4 again in orange if you have room on your nail.

Step 7: Matte top coat and done!

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