KnockOut Cosmetics Flatte Black & BM19 with China Glaze Millenium

After yesterday's borefest, I tried to do something cool today. I started with one of the KO KnockOut Cosmetics Flatte polishes. I have three of these, for which I paid way too much. The other two are Calamine & Karen. This is a seriously matte black. I love it, it's my favorite of all that I've tried. I decided to use it as a base for stamping with one of my new Bundle Monster plates.

Here's a super-messy, not yet cleaned up pic of what this polish looks like on its own:

OK, so then I used the leafy full nail image from BM19. I've been sorta fiddling around with these plates since I got them, and I'm not certain how I feel yet. Yes, the full nail designs are much smaller than Konad's. If you place exactly right and don't have very wide nails, you can get away with one stamp. I did on all except my thumbnails which I took a stab at double-stamping. I think my nails are average width, so your milage may vary. Also: the designs. For some reason I have trouble getting these images as crisp as Konad's. I've used their Special Polish but honestly had better results using China Glaze's Millenium, a metallic silver. I almost feel as though I have to wait to stamp or it gets smeary. As in, after I scrape it, I let it sit for a few seconds before rolling the stamp to pick up the image. If I do that with Konad, forget it--I might as well start over, it'll be dry. I didn't have too much trouble with the more line based images (such as this one) but the larger, thicker stars and swirls and such--this is where I had a problem. More to come on these, just giving you guys my preliminary thoughts.

Here's my non-cleaned up stamping job, still mattified:

And my double-stamped thumb. I think it works best to stamp the image twice horizontally across the nail (whereas usually you'd use the image vertically). I think it's easier to line up.

So after all this I wasn't totally happy. Little pieces of dried up polish from the edges of the design were sticking up (does this ever happen to anyone else?) and they wouldn't stay down so I decided to throw a coat of Seche Vite over it all and shine the darn thing up. I ended up liking it even more this way because it really made the silver and black contrast pop.

Here's the finished, cleaned-up (thank god, right??), shined-up, manicure:

I actually kind of love it! But after two days of black polish, I'm ready for some color tomorrow, I think.

Thanks for reading!