• First you need to have a good, safe area for stamping. You will make a mess. I like cutting out pieces of cardboard and using that as my stamping area, but I’ve seen some people use paper towels.
  • It’s okay to press kinda hard when transferring the image to your nail, sometimes it works best that way. 
  • You must work QUICKLY. I can’t stress this enough.  You’ll find what speed you need, and it always varies on the polish. 
  • Sometimes they say you should rough up the ends with a emery board file so that it’ll pick up the image better. Personally I don’t see the big deal or purpose in it. The texture still feels the same.
  • ENSURE your nail polish base is dry! You don’t necessarily need a polished base, but if you do, make sure it’s completely dry and can handle being pressed upon on. We don’t want the polish bunching up and sliding, do we?
  • You need lots of patience! It will suck the first few times then when you get it, it’s so easy and fun 🙂 
    • For the first few times it’s good idea to practice stamping over your old manicures, because if it sucks horribly you can just scrap the whole thing, no big deal. 

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    STEP BY STEP PHOTO TUTORIAL
    • Begin with your work station, have everything ready. What you will need:
      • Stamping plate
      • Stamper/scraper (scraper, you can use an old credit card or ID card, whatever floats your boat, if you don’t like the one Konad or Born Pretty provides)
      • Polish
      • Cotton ball/pad/Q-Tip soaked in acetone
      • Something to go underneath your stuff, so that scraped polish doesn’t mess your table. I use cut out cardboard squares from boxes and what not, and toss them when they get too covered in old polish. Economical! 🙂
    •  Apply polish to the side of your image
      • Some people like to fill it in, but I find it just makes a bigger mess and uses up a lot of unnecessary polish. I like to put a glob on about 1/4 of it. Sometimes it’s a trial and error, figuring out how much polish will cover the whole image plate.
      • You can also manipulate your polish and scraping to cover only certain parts of your image plate and even use several colors at once
    • Scrape the polish over the image, from the inside of the plate to the outside so that the polish ends up on the cardboard/paper towel.
      • I just like doing it this way, sometimes people scrape from the outside to the inside
    • ALWAYS clean up between each stamp.
      • Some people don’t, but I find that the engravings flood and I can’t even really stamp for the second time so it’s pointless. I always swipe over the plate and sometimes the stamper or scraper (if it’s built up too much polish) between every stamp
    •  At this point you must MOVE like LIGHTNING.
      • The polish will begin to dry rapidly
    • In a rolling motion from one direction to the another, use the stamper end to pick up the image
      • Don’t go back and forth
      • Don’t press TOO hard (you will figure out for yourself what the acceptable pressure is) or the image will smear.
    • Quickly line up the stamper to your nail
      • Again, with a rolling motion, stamp on the nail.
    • DON’T:
      • Go back and forth
      • Just slap it on, the image will peel back up
    • It’s okay to press fairly hard, if your nail polish is completely dry, this will help the image transfer better. 
    • Practice with this step! You can stamp on a piece of paper to test out various possible stamping polishes, or your general technique. I recommend this, so you don’t ruin your manicure. Also if you’re a novice stamper, stamp over old manicures right before you plan to take them off, so if you ruin it, no big deal.

     Final result! This kind of sucks, I was going very slowly and as a result some of the dots never transferred properly, but hey, it comes with the territory of making a tutorial 🙂 So you see all that stuff around the cuticles? What do you do with them? Here is my final step.

     Clean up!
    • In this photo I use a Q-Tip. I’m just showing the options available. Myself, I use a brush dipped in acetone. I’ve heard a lot of people say eyeliner brushes are the best but I have yet to try this. 
      • Pointed Q-Tips will work a lot better than this one though. You can see the lint wanting to get everywhere 🙂
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    You will notice I never use Konad Special Polishes. In an upcoming post I will be discussing stamping polishes. 🙂