those are the only two that turned out half-decent

and even then I had way too much smearing with my top coat 😭

otherwise with the sponge it had a sort of almost spraypainted look before the top coat messed it up....

so I think my lessons learned are:

- a super dark color probably wasn't the best to start with, I just have a lot of dark purple polish

- it's messy af and I'm already someone who's relatively messy with paint....

- it's hard to get the dark color in at the edges of the nail bed, but using a tiny nail art brush to dab it in kinda helped

- this base and top coat I'm using are brand new so idk their quirks yet, but it's clear that my sponging needs to be BONE DRY before I put the top coat on next time

- trying to paint in the darker color at the bottom of my nail honestly made it worse and it was far better with just sponge alone

- I am honestly not sure if making the lighter coat the base coat worked all that well. if I want the dark end at the bottom of my nail it might be better to make the dark color the base and sponge the lighter on top. I might have to experiment with that sometime