Before & After: Butterflowers

Okay, look. It was much nicer in my head.

Remember I said I had another 'Inspired By Dali' manicure in my head, one that was more inspired-by than reproduction-of? Well, here it is. It's not bad. But it doesn't look the way I hoped it would. See, the problem is...well, let's hold off on that for a minute. 

Here's the artwork that inspired the manicure, Dali's Butterfly Rose:

Pretty cool the way the butterfly wings are used as leave, huh? I thought so, anyway...

For my mani, I started with a base of Orly's Pretty-Ugly, and soft robin's-egg-blue with a pretty blue shimmer (I don't understand the name, I must admit):

Orly Pretty-Ugly, artificial light, 3 coats, excellent formula.

Here is my manicure. I used Sally Hansen Rapid Red and Pueen 14 for the rose; the butterflies are fimo slices:

So how exactly did this go so wrong? Well, Bob, let's take another look at the tape:

1) This needs to be done on longer nails, so I can have space between the butterfly 'leaves', and maybe even add one more in. 

2) The rose is too big, and has too much visual weight compared to the butterfly wings.

3) The stem is too dark. What was I thinking?

4) I should have stuck with yellow for the rose, because it needs to have less visual weight than the butterfly wings.

5) I picked the wrong color butterflies to go against the background (the blue washes out the green butterflies) and the rose (the red makes the orange look funky). 

That said, and all of those mistakes listed, I do like this okay, particularly in theory, and I will do another version at some point in the future on my other hand (which has longer nails most of the time). Or maybe I'll do it horizontally over the length of all 4 nails. So this here manicure is a great example of learning by doing--sometimes you have to make the mistakes to figure out how the elements will work together, right?   

Yeah, yeah, I planned it as a learning lesson...yeah...>.>

Thanks for looking! Hugs and loves. :)

M.