Here is what you will need to stamp with:
You need polish, of course. The thicker and more opaque the polish, the better. Then you need a stamping plate, obviously. You will need a special rubber stamper. There are all sorts of them. I got mine in a stamping kit. You will also need a scraper. My set came with a metal scraper to scrape off the excess polish from the plate. Konad, a popular nail stamping company (their plates are expensive, so I only have two Konad plates) sells a metal scraper, too. The problem with metal scrapers is that they can scratch your image plates! Many people, myself included, prefer to use plastic. I use an old gift card and it works perfectly. It can't scratch the plates, either.
So, you need to put some polish onto the plate:
It is best to put polish on just one side of the image. The indentations of the image are extremely shallow, so you only need a little polish. You don't need to waste much!
Next, you scrape the polish, with your scraper, into the image so you are left with polish only in the image:
Once you have scraped, you need to work fast because a layer of polish that thin dries very quickly. Take your stamper and press or roll it over the image to pick up the paint:
You should be left with the image on your stamper. Quickly roll that on to your nail before it dries.
To clean the plates and stamper, you can use nail polish remover or pure acetone. I prefer pure acetone because it cleans the plates so much easier. It can leave an iridescent sheen on the plates, but that is not permanent. It is just residue that can be rubbed off, and it won't affect your stamping at all.
Keep in mind that mastering stamping can take a while. I have greatly improved over the time that I have been doing it, but I am still not perfect at it. When you do it yourself, you find techniques that work best for you. Different images can be easier or harder to stamp with and some polishes do not work well. Konad and other brands sell special stamping polishes. I do not own any of them, though. The only way to get better at stamping is to keep playing around and trying it out.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below. Anybody can leave a comment because I have it set so you can comment under "anonymous" if you do not have a Gmail account or other accounts. I hope this was helpful!
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