Tara's Talons Clowning Around with hand placed glitter

Tara's Talons Clowning Around is another polish in my Autumn colour palette and it is a spectacular polish to put on if you only have time for a single polish with no nail art. I used three coats below. I love the varied colours and sizes of glitter in the polish which give it a really unique look.

I wore this polish alone for a day and then added a hand placed glitter nail. I haven't done hand placed glitter for ages but I love the effect you get with it. I started with the middle stripe and then worked outwards from there.

I used two coats of topcoat over the glitter to seal it in (although I still picked off a couple of pieces over the course of an evening).

Unfortunately my middle nail broke while I was doing some heavy lifting so tomorrow I will be debuting rounded/almond nails for the first time on the blog in my Indian design. This pots is also part of UK Indie Month which you can see through the inkslinks below.

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31DC Rainbow

I'm sure a lot of people will have done a gradient mani for this but I went for it anyway and I'm pretty pleased with myself because I only used four colours to make this manicure and my nails are long enough for this. The colours I used were NYC Chelsea Cherry, Lexington Yellow, Lavender Cupcake and Orly Blue Collar. This is my first time going into a gradient deliberately trying to mix different colours (green and orange).

I use a gradient technique where you put the colours on a plastic bag and mix them a little bit before picking them up with a sponge and dabbing onto your nails. I use makeup sponges from Primark (something ridiculous like 20 for £1!) I also painted my nails in white first as this reduces the amount of coats you need to get an even coverage. 

Clean up is one of the things that would put me off doing gradients so I thought I'd show you how I minimise the amount of mess created. First I tape off my fingers round the sides and across the cuticle (as close to the nail polish line as I can) then I sponge on my gradient and carefully remove the tape, you can see between 1 and 2 how much clean up this has saved. I then top coat the design and wait a few seconds for it to dry before cleaning up on my skin with a cotton bud dipped in nail polish remover followed by using a clean up brush to remove the nail polish very close to my nail and to create a nice line at the cuticle.

Bright gradients are one of the easiest ways to achieve high impact nail art but without the clean up they do have a tendency to look messy and unprofessional. I would recommend that you have a go but keep your sellotape and cotton buds handy.  On an unrelated note I have been approached by the Born Pretty Store to review products for them and I have also been given a 10% discount code to pass on to my readers :). My first products won't be coming for a couple of weeks but if you want any nail art supplies you can click on the picture below to be taken to their website, remember to use the code for 10% off:

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