Fan Brush Gradient

Fan brushes are the ones that come in packs of nail art brushes and nobody really uses. I decided to use one to create a sort of marbled gradient. I generously dotted four different colours up my nail and then swept the fan brush side to side moving from the top to the bottom of the nail.

I put down a white base to make the colours pop and if you do this you have to be really careful to get colour over the whole nail.

I will definitely be trying this again, although the clean up is a little traumatic- make sure you put tape on the sides of your fingers before you start! What do you think of this?

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London baby!

This weekend I move to London to start my new job so I have been packing like crazy and trying to do some extra nail art to schedule for next week because I will be too busy to blog. A while ago I got the Moyou London plate which has stamping patterns linked to London on it and thought this was the perfect time to try it out.

The base polish here is a fantastic Nails Inc that I have had in my collection for months and never tried. There is just the perfect amount of glitter, you can see it through the cream base and it is opaque in two coats. I give you Nails Inc Grove Cottages:

The patterns included are the tube map, the skyline and a beefeater.

Yesterday I also discovered the app Citymapper which is just incredible- if you are visiting London you need this app, it offers you multiple different ways of transport between points and tells you how long it will take and how much it will cost as well as many other cool features-genius!

I had fun making this little tribute to my new home city (slightly over excited!) if you have any great suggestions for things to do/eat in London please let me know.

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Farewell Pocket Money Polishes

The sad news from this weekend is that Charlie is retiring Pocket Money Polishes to move forward with other parts of her life. I love my collection of glitter toppers from her and will treasure them all the more now. I thought I'd do a little mani to show off two of mine.

The background gradient here is Sinful Colours Cinderella to Blue by You, this also has an added change from pink shimmer to green shimmer which would not photograph!

The two PMPs are Firework and Yellow Submarine. I love Yellow Submarine the most :)

And mattified, gradients always look good mattified. Farewell Pocket Money Polish, you will be missed.

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My favourite colour scheme watercolour

When I was looking at my nude nails after my interview and deciding what to paint on top of them I reverted back to one of my favourite colour combinations; grey, blue and yellow. I used the watercolour technique that I learnt from Mr. Candipants (which I used with a different colour combination here.)

 The colours I used here are Barry M Blue Grape, Mavala Berlin and NYC Lexington Yellow, I diluted them with acetone before applying them to my nail then used a brush with some more acetone on it to smudge the edges a little bit more.

This is one of those designs that looks better at arms length rather than the close ups you see on my blog. Still easy instant wow factor if you choose a striking colour scheme and do bold sections of colour.

I am currently deciding what (if any) nail art I want to do over this but trust me it doesn't need it.

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Purple Holographic Waterfall

I recently picked up Barry M Blueberry and Prickly Pear as they are the perfect creamy ice cream colours for my spring palette (unfortunately minty green doesn't suit my skin tone so you won't be seeing much of that). I first decided to gradient them but should have put a coat of white then gradiented over that, as over the blue the purple came too close and the gradient did not show up on camera so I did a waterfall mani instead:

This mani did not want to photograph either! I have several very blurry shots and a few not quite so blurry photos.

I only used holo polishes for the waterfall in shade of grey, blue and purple I got this photo on my iPhone showing the effect this has.

I experienced terrible tip wear with this, overnight all of the tips were showing and I'll have to change it today. This may be because there were a few layers to this and because I forgot to wrap my tips although I would still expect better than one day wear without wrapped tips.

Waterfall is a really cool technique that was first thought up by Sammy over at The Nailasaurus and she has a tutorial on how to achieve it. It is pretty easy and looks great :)

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On trend 2014: White Nails with Neon Ruffian

I enjoy the palette cleanser that white nails provide but find them a little stark and boring on their own so today I'm going to show you a way to add a pop of colour using a gradient ruffian.

I wanted a neon pop to this so I used Orly Hook Up and Holla and Lilypad Lacquer In Pink We Trust with OPI My Boyfriend Scales Wall. There was no particular order to where I put the neon polishes but my nail beds are only really wide enough for two colours- if you have wider nail beds you could put all three on each nail.

I have made a photo tutorial for this look so you can recreate it at home:

1) Freehand stripes of your chosen colours vertically on your nail- it does not matter what this looks like at the tip (one coat should do) but make sure you paint the whole nail to help the white polish level later on.

2) Top coat! Make sure you topcoat to prevent streaking of the colours onto the white later!

3) Paint a stripe of white up the middle of your nail leaving a small strip of the colours exposed at the cuticle

4) Paint up the sides of the nail so that the colour is seen in a crescent moon shape at the base of your nails. It will take two coats of white to make this fully opaque- have a tiny brush on hand to use with acetone incase you make a mistake (because you have a layer of top coat over the colours you can correct small mistakes without losing the colour)

Then topcoat your final design, clean up around your cuticle to get the perfect oval shape and you're good to go.

NB this design makes your nails look shorter but your fingers look longer- if you have short nails that you dislike you have been warned! This is easier if you use a white polish with a small brush (the OPI was a little too big for my tiny nails). If you use my tutorial I would love to see it :).

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Nimbus and Pahlish Half Moon

On top of Smitten Polish Nimbus I decided to do a half moon using Pahlish Prayer for Rain a blue jelly glitter. I only used one coat of the Pahlish on top of Nimbus which meant that the jelly picked up a pale blue tone matching Nimbus really well.

This is very wintery and cool toned, perfect to wear for the start of December.

Tomorrow I have some Ethereal Lacquer swatches for you.

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Imperio Sun Burst Half Moon

I decided to use one of my Tara's Talons advent calendar polishes to do some nail art on top of Smitten Polish Imperio. This is Tinsel an awesome gold polish.

I decided to do a free hand half-moon and sun burst design and I really like how it turned out.

Tomorrow I have another Smitten Polish to show you, one that I love very much.

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Textured Dots

Yesterday I was in London again interviewing and had a couple of hours to spare so I went and had dinner with a friend at the Southbank. We wandered through the Christmas market there and had a sneaky cup of mulled wine, it was great :). When I got home I wanted to play with finish and texture so I came up with these matte textured dotty nails:

The base here is two coats of Barry M Espresso which has a gorgeous satin finish- not quite as flat as some matte polishes I have seen. It applies quite easily you just have to be careful not to take too long putting it on a single nail as it starts to dry quickly.

I then added dots of Barry M Lady and OPI Alcatraz Rocks. Lady is a new acquisition and I really like it. I bought it to mimic the look of fresh snow and it definitely does that :). Alcatraz Rocks seems to have picked up the black base of Espresso but I quite like it- it makes this mani more monochrome.

I really like this :) I'm not sure how long it'll last because there's absolutely no top coat involved but I'm enjoying it immensely while it does. I thought I'd share my best picture from London just to finish off this post:

Have a great weekend!

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33DC Black Matte Contrast Nails

The challenge for today is to choose a manicure from your pinterest board and recreate it. I choose this one from Copy That Copy Cat nails. But because my nails are shorter my shiny details are less complex.

I used my Barry M matte polish in Espresso for the base coat and then used NYC Grand Central Station to create the patterns. I much prefer this way of using the contrast between matte and shiny than just doing a french manicure, it gives it a subtle elegance. I'm not sure how long this will last because there's no top coat involved and matte nail polishes are notorious for chipping quickly. Here is Espresso alone at 2 coats:

My computer has done something really weird to the next photo but it made me giggle quite a lot so I thought I'd share it with you.

Remember to check out everyone else's pinterest inspired manis through the inkslinks below :)

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Autumn spotty nails

I really enjoyed making these nails :) my boyfriend suggested I do some nail art using autumnal colours and I decided to go a little abstract and just do dots in the colours on a nude base.

The colours used here are Barry M Lychee, OPI Every Month is Oktoberfest, OPI A Woman's Prague-ative and NYC Money Never Sleeps. I used two sizes of dotting tool- just pressing a little more lightly if I wanted a smaller dot. I started by adding the large dots to the nail then filling in the spaces around them, ensuring that none of the dots touched each other. 

33DC Geometric

For my geometric nail art I decided to use these parallelogram loose glitters I have to create cubes on my nails. I love how it turned out and can only apologise for the light I had to take this in.

The base for this is NYC A suitcase and a donut, a gorgeous greyish, blackish navy, I am showing you two coats which were just perfect for this polish.

These little glitters are incredibly holographic and I just love this easy cube effect. However, on reflection I wish I'd considered the camera and put my cubes the other way up... here's what they looked like for me :):

There we go, I loved this but I have to admit it only lasted for a couple of hours because I pick glitter off my nails...

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33DC Pixellated Gradient

Pixellated nail art is something I first did back in July. I have been seeing it around a lot more recently and thought it would be a great way to incorporate the prompts of three colour gradient with a pattern. I love the colour scheme of blue, grey and yellow that I used for this, they just go together so well. I used a single polish for each and then used white polish to change the saturation but keep it the same hue.

The polishes I used were A England Dorian Gray, Barry M Blue Grape and NYC Lexington Yellow. The yellow was the hardest to get different shade of at the right thickness, hence why there is so much less of it.

I did these nails by using the base I already had on (Nails Inc Covent Garden Ballet), putting OPI Matte Top Coat on and drawing a simple grid using my white Barry M nail art pen (these pens work so much better over a matte base. I then used a small brush to fill in the small squares, mixing a colour and putting it in across all my nails, then mixing the next colour. It took a surprisingly short amount of time to do- in the range of half an hour but I didn't have to paint my base colour on as well.

I love how this looks, it's so simple but really effective. If you're going to use the same effect as me with the lighter squares it's easier to pick a dark colour and lighten it in stages with white polish than it is to try and darken a colour without greying it. Tomorrow will be a small update about some new polishes available in the (UK) shops with a few swatches.

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33DC Manicure with 2 Patterns

The challenge for today was to do a manicure with two patterns, I could have cheated a little and done a different pattern different nails to produce a skittle mani. I decided instead to test my stamping skills and stamp two patterns onto each nail, one half each.

I used two patterns from my Moyou Sailor plate 4 but they're a little unbalanced as the image on the left is so much busier than the one on the right.

I'm not sure that this is something I would wear again- it definitely doesn't show that I had to stamp twice.

Oops almost forgot to tell you what amazing base colour this is- it's Whimsy by piCture pOlish- the perfect blue.

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Hidden Eye Nail Art with Crows Toes One Trick Pony

Everyone and his dog has done this nail art but I really like it and thought it would work very well on the base of Crows Toes One Trick Pony.

One Trick Pony is a purple-teal colour changing holo. Battling the english weather I managed to get a little of the holo to show in the above photo but under artificial light this one really sparkles. It applied very easily and this is three coats although two would probably have been sufficient if you're not taking macro photos.

I drew on the black spaces with my Barry M nail art pen. These dry really fast so I didn't have to wait long before I could draw on the eyes with my white nail art pen. I made them all look in different directions and I do think my hidden monsters in the dark look a little afraid themselves.

I loved this, I wore it for three days with no tip wear and I didn't stop liking it, I was very sad to eventually have to take it off. Happy Halloween!

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33DC South America Aztec Temple

Today's post is late because I took off my first manicure for this prompt without taking any photos. I didn't want to do the same things again so I give you the aztec temple in silhouette:

The base here is a Nelly Polish sample which she was selling off and I did the step detail in Barry M Espresso.

It's another one that looks great when your hand is in exactly the right position and weird the rest of the time...

Tomorrow I'll be sharing some exciting news so be sure to check in :).

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