Black Cat Lacquer Midnight City Swatch

Today I am showing you Midnight City by Black Cat Lacquer, a phenomenal black jelly glitter with holographic circles, hexagons and crescent moons in it. I layered it over a coat of Barry M Black but as I then added three coats of the polish to get the glitter distribution I wanted I could probably have just used the polish, however, with this kind of polish I would advocate using a base so that you can control the glitter density without having to worry about if the base is even.

I love that this polish is like a galaxy manicure in a bottle complete with little planets and crescent moons.

I love how rock and roll this looks on my new nail shape. If you haven't already guessed I am a total convert to the almond shaped nail- they elongate my fingers in a way that square nails never did and they look really classy. However I will be worried every time I file them that I'm going to file off the wrong bit and lose the shape!

What do you think? Black nail polish that still looks great on slightly longer nails, it's definitely a win for me. By the way you may have noticed ads popping up on my site- I'm hoping to raise a little bit of money to spend on polishes to be able to buy polishes which I love and want to share with you. 

Tweet

33DC Flowers: Moyou Tulip Stamping

As soon as I saw this Moyou stamping plate image I knew what I wanted to do with it and that was to make stamper decals:

These are quite simple to make- pick up your image on your stamper as per usual and while it's on the stamper use nail polish to colour in the parts of the design you want to (here I coloured in the tulips and the grass below them)  then add a generous coat of clear nail polish to the image and wait for it to dry (I usually leave mine about 15-20 minutes) then use tweezers to peel the whole thing off the stamper, place it on your (dry!) base coloured nails, use nail scissors to cut away any excess around your nails and then put another coat of the same clear top coat over the top, wrapping the tips.

I used a few different polshes here, the background is Jessica Lime Cooler, the flowers are H&M Orange and Yellow, OPI Flashbulb Fuchsia and A England Rose Bower, and the leaves are NYC High Line Green.
I love the effect you can get with stamped decals, they can produce some exceptional nail art images. Remember to check out all the other 33 day challenge flower designs, there will be some amazing nail art!

Tweet

Up! Nail Art with Indy's Indies

A new UK indie polish maker has popped up :). Indy's Indies first collection was inspired by disney films and a couple of autumn themed polishes. The one which caught my eye was the totally unique glitter topper Balloon House, inspired by the movie Up! This is a clear based polish with small circle glitters in a variety of matte colours. Rather than just doing a swatch of the polish I decided to do some nail art representing my favourite thing about the movie (other than the touching sequence where you are introduced to Ellie) Kevin!

My index and little fingers are single coats of Balloon House so you can see what it looks like alone (with added balloon tails). For my ring finger I hand placed glitter into the bunch to get the clustered effect. I then used my nail art pen to draw on the strings and the outline of Kevin on my middle finger before filling in the colours. The bubbles were my fault because I underestimated how thick the polish was and didn't leave enough time to dry between coats.

The colours used were: Essie Rock the Boat, Barry M Black nail art pen, Indy's Indies Balloon House, OPI Tomorrow Never Dies and Hi Pumpkin, NYC Lexington Yellow, Digital Nails Convergent, Elegant Touch White.

I love how this turned out and it got a few compliments as well :). I'm excited to see what else Danielle is coming up with and I hope there are some more gems like this in her future collections.

Tweet

33DC Indian Design

I decided to go with an intricate design inspired by the sort of patterns often associated with Indian art and henna. Also today is the exciting debut of my new rounded nail shape! I broke off the corner of my middle finger doing some heavy lifting earlier this week and decided to try a new nail shape rather than losing all my length.I was really worried about it but now I really like it :).

I started this design with a base coat of Collection Scorched, then added the details with Deborah Lippmann Through the Fire, NYC Water Street Blue, Full Metal Jacket and my Barry M black nail art pen.

This design came out really well and I love the autumn feel this has with a pop of blue.

Remember to check out everyone else's Indian themed nail art and pop back tomorrow to see a new UK indie polish with some cute nail art (I'll give you a hint, it's about balloons)

Tweet

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.

Tweet

33DC Chevron with Emily de Molly Blueprint

Today's 33 day challenge prompt is chevron. I wanted to use this polish which arrived last Saturday to do my chevrons. The base is Emily de Molly Blueprint and I hand painted on the chevrons in OPI A Woman's Prague-Ative.

Isn't it funny how sometimes you get a polish and it sits on your desk looking at you for months before you use it and sometimes you get a polish out and have to put it straight onto your nails. It was definitely a case of the latter with this one. This is two medium thickness coats, it looked very streaky on the first coat but the second evened everything up and made it totally opaque. This polish has a navy base with mixed sizes of royal blue glitter, some small purple glitter and purple shimmer. The matte photo on the bottom left best captures the purple shimmer of the polish. I used OPI matte top coat and it looks amazing matte.

For my chevron design the base was already matte so I carefully painted on the chevrons with a small nail art brush and the OPI polish and then didn't top coat the design as I wanted to keep the contrast between the matte base and the shiny, glittery chevrons.

I love these two colours together, they look and feel really autumnal. I have a nail wheel of the colours I've chosen to make up my autumn colour palette and A Woman's Prague-Ative is one of them. My aim is then to use these colours through my designs this autumn to pull my designs together.

I loved wearing this manicure, Blueprint is an amazing polish and if you like blues and purples I would strongly suggest that you check it out. I didn't know if I'd be able to freehand chevrons but it was easier than I anticipated :).

Tweet

Celtic Heart Knots

When I got my Bundle Monster 2013 Blogger Collection Plates I was really drawn to this full nail image of heart shaped celtic knots. I decided to stamp it over a gradient of A England polishes Ascalon, Lady of the Lake and Tristam. I think I've said before that the A England polishes gradient out really nicely and work together really well in most combinations. If you follow me on facebook or twitter you've probably seen this image already- I got a little arty with my shiny new plates. I have other pictures of this manicure but none that I like so much so I'm only going to show you this one plus some pictures of what I've been working on in my spare time.

Polish jewellery! I made this galaxy themed ring for a friends birthday (you are also getting a slightly blurry sneak peek at Thursday's nail art). 

It was a bit tricky to figure out how to do a galaxy backwards but I managed it :).

So there we have my ventures into nail polish jewellery. I'll keep you updated with any other designs I make.

Tweet