When what you see isn't what you get

Hi Everyone!!! Happy Weekend!  I had an awesome day yesterday NOT WORKING and spending some great quality time with my family.  I cooked up 5 corned beef roasts and we took them over to my little sisters house for a fabulous corned beef, cabbage, carrots and potato dinner.  My Aunt Net came down from Menomonee Falls to spend the weekend with mom so she was there helping to part of the usually Lutze family insanity LOL!  We had a great time though--we talked about vacations we took together and all the fun times we had growing up.

My corned beef dinner was a rip roaring success as always but oh lord the mani I tried to do was so not a success!  I saw this totally awesome Celtic plate and really wanted to recreate it but fell so short!  Like I didn't even make the landing that's how short I was!

Here's the plate I tried to recreate

Pretty cool isn't it???  I love it and really wanted to try this on my nail.

Here's my fail

Just not happy at all with how it turned out!  I'm going to spend some time today trying to see if I can nail this look.

Here's they are side by side, it's just not good enough for me!

Have you ever had this happen before?  When you just really needed it to be spot on and it wasn't?  What did you do?  Did you keep trying?  Or did you just give up?

Okay I've worked on this today and while it is not an exact match to the plate I really like how this end result turned out!  What do you think??

I did a saran wrap mani using Elevation Streetside NYC, Illamasqua Unnatural and then I painted a star shape using Loreal Brownie Points.  I stamped using Cheeky XL D

I really do like this look better than my first attempt

I do think my first attempt is more like the plate though!

Here's a comparison collage, 2nd attempt on top

What do you think?  Which one do you like best--1st or 2nd mani?