British Nail Bloggers Halloween Challenge

The British Nail Bloggers are having a mini, no pressure, Halloween Nail Art Challenge, and I thought I'd get in on today's prompt which is 'What's lurking in the dark?' with some simple nail art inspired by My Little Canvas. I used two coats of W7-Black for the base and then added white eyes with Barry M-Matt White. On top of the white I added a coat of Astral Lights glow in the dark polish (it's about 10 years old!) and then 'irises' in Barry M-Mango, Key Lime, Rimmel-Rose Libertine and Revlon-Electric. Once these were dry I added pupils with my black Barry M nail art pen.

Haha, these are utterly ridiculous but I'm really enjoying them! Check out the other cool designs in the inlinkz too!

~Nail Art Novice~

Mish Mash Challenge Week 8-Cold

Sooooo...I missed a week of the Mish Mash challenge and feel really bad about it. I keep going up to visit my boyface in Sheffield and then ending up staying longer than I anticipated and missing lots of posts-oops! So today's mani is the new Mish Mash challenge prompt which is cold (co-incidentally ended up very close to 'Hot' in the list!). I wanted something relatively simple so I picked out some 'cold' colours (Pale blue, white and silver) and went at it.
Polishes used: Revlon-Blue Lagoon, Rimmel-Serene and H&M-Silver Frost. I added some wintery tree decals from YRNails to contribute to the effect too.

I actually really like this, it's definitely 'cold' in colour but it's pretty and delicate too. Now I've got the hang of them I really like using these decals, they're such a simple way of sprucing up an other wise boring mani, I think.

I'm off camping this weekend with my fella (Lovely weather for it, ey!) so I might be a bit absent again, but will try and get some appropriately themed nails done before we leave!

See you soon, have a good weekend all!

~Nail Art Novice~

Don't forget to check out the other ladies fab efforts this week:

Rara's Goin' On A Summer Holiday...

Right now Rara is off sunning herself (hopefully) in Cornwall on her summer hols (lucky thing!) and she came over the other day and did some beach themed holiday nails for her trip. She took inspiration from these nails by The Crafty Ninja and these which she found on Google+ but are un-watermarked. (If anyone knows who did them originally, please let me know so I can credit them).
She used a myriad of polishes and I can't find the list where I wrote them all down so I'm just going to tell you the ones I remember for now. If anyone has a burning desire to know the colours specifically, just ask and I will try and be helpful! I know the sky is Revlon-Blue Lagoon and the 'beach' colour is Barry M-Lychee. The white of the beach ball was Barry M-Matt White and all the black and white details were done with nail art pens-both Barry M and Andrea Fulerton. She started by painting all her nails blue then sponging on the Lychee when that was dry. Then she just freehanded on the rest of the details using a dotting tool and a paintbrush.
Enough chatter, on to the pictures!

From thumb to little finger she's got a beach ball, some palm trees and hammock (possibly not in Cornwall!), a beach hut, a sandcastle and a starfish. Aren't they fab? I think my favourite is the sandcastle.

I hope she's having a lovely time away and I'm definitely not jealous at all! Haha. Are you going anywhere nice this summer?

~Rara & Nail Art Novice~

More Easter Nail Art!

Rara's back today with another awesome Easter/Spring inspired nail art. Yes I know it's been and gone, but is that any reason to stop wearing awesome things on your nails?

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Hi again! I'm back with my second Easter nail art and for this one I decided I'd use several different ideas-Easter eggs, a chick, a rabbit and a butterfly.
I used this rather impressive array of polishes:
Avon-Inspire, Avon-Orchid Splash, Avon-Red Reveal, Barry M-Matt White, Barry M Gelly-Watermelon, Barry M-Pink Flamingo, Barry M Textured-Atlantic Road, Andrea Fulerton Dot and Flick-Black and a green nail art pen I got from Ebay a while ago.
These were my results:

I'm not as enamoured with the chick and the rabbit as I was last time but I still think they turned out OK! The butterfly was hard to do but turned out pretty well in the end. I have, however, realised I need a baby/sky blue that isn't textured...oh no, that means I need to go nail polish shopping, how awful for me! [Novice- I said she was a bad influence on me, didn't I!]

Also my (not-so) little sister wanted her nails doing too so I whipped up another spring-themed mani for her on her tiny nubbins!

I used Avon-Orchid Splash, Barry M-Matt White, Andrea Fulerton Dot and Flick-Black and the same green nail art pen to do some rabbits:

I will admit that it was really hard to do such tiny faces so some of them do look a bit cross or worried, and I never realised how difficult it was to paint someone else's nails! I think they turned out pretty well though.

This concludes my Easter eggstravaganza (Sorry...), I hope you all had a good one and that the Easter bunny visited your house and left you lots of scrummy treats!

Until next time, 

~Rara~

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Oh dear, that was a terrible pun! That aside, I really like these nails, especially that they're so detailed because they're tiny! I'm impressed at least. And I love the worried rabbits!

Big thanks to Rara for these posts, and I'll be back at the weekend with some blog post challenges, and hopefully a new mani if I get time. Otherwise I'll see you on Tuesday!

~Nail Art Novice~

Bluffy Funnies

As I mentioned the other day, this week I'm separated from my polishes so will be unable to post, so Rara is filling in for me with her excellent Easter inspired manis! As it's Tuesday and I would normally 'Try Something', here's a post featuring something new to this blog:

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Hello again!
Hope that you all had a good Easter and enjoyed the extended weekend (if you're in the UK, at least!)
This was my first easter mani.
I used the following polishes: Avon-Inspire, Avon-Sea Breeze, Avon-Orchid Splash, Barry M-Matt White and Andrea Fulerton Dot and Flick in Black.
I also used some yellow and white flocking powder from Ebay-I got a really good deal-16 colours for under £4! (Think it was this listing)
I wanted a cutesy design for this mani so I thought I would go with fluffy chicks and rabbits-literally!

I love the rabbit on my thumb!
I painted the rabbit head and ears/chick head and added the fluff on top using tweezers and then flattened it all down using a nail art brush. I then used the Dot and Flick to paint on the details. The fluff felt a bit strange at first but I soon got used to it-in fact I couldn't stop stroking it!! The only downside was that where I work I have to handle a lot of money and the fluff soon got dirty and started to look a bit grey =(
But all in all I would definitely recommend flocking powder to anyone who doesn't mind strange textures (unlike Novice, the big weirdo)

I'll see you next time, 

~Rara~

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Yeah, I can take being called a weirdo, I guess, in return for this adorable fluffy nail art!

Some Flowers, Pretty Daisies, Might Relieve The Gloom

So the snow is just about melting away now, and I actually saw blue sky today, for the first time in ages. I'm daring to hope that Spring is actually waking up *fingers crossed* so I have painted my nails accordingly.

I recently treated myself to a couple of Spring colours from the Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure (SHCSM) collection which I knew would be perfect for this type of mani. These are polishes which, in theory, you can wear without basecoat and topcoat but knowing how long I like to keep my manis on for I didn't want to risk stains and chips so I used them as normal. (In case you're interested that's Sally Hansen Insta-Grip and Seche Vite.)

I started with my base colours of SHCSM-Grass Slipper and SHCSM-Fairy Teal reversing my accents as usual. They're both almost one coaters in terms of opacity, although I ended up doing three of each to even out visible brush strokes as they didn't apply especially well. I really love the colours though, they're pretty stunning and definitely right for spring time. I have a bit of a crush on Fairy Teal too, tealy-greeny-blues being my favourite colours!

Apologise for the blur, it didn't look blurry on my camera!
This is Grass Slipper with an accent of Fairy Teal

And this, of course, is the opposite.
The blue staining you can see isn't polish-it's printer ink and
 WILL NOT come off!

Then I took my dotting tools and my white Colour Me polish to add daisies to each nail, basically just placing them randomly. I find it kind of interesting that even though I was using the same tool size on each hand my flowers are much smaller on my right hand (done with non-dominant) than my left-and I think I actually prefer the smaller ones-except where they went a bit wonky! The flower middles are Revlon-Sunshine Sparkle and Rimmel-Tangy Tangerine which was a bit of a last minute addition because I hadn't anticipated how yellow the Grass Slipper would turn my white (and it was still out from my last mani.) I kind of like the effect though, it doesn't look out of place with the rest of the mani:

Overall I reckon this is a mani fit for Springtime, just need the weather to catch up and it'll be fab.

Just to let you know I'll be away next week, so apart from my 31 Blog Challenge post going up tomorrow, this is the last you'll hear from me for a week or so. Instead of me, next week you'll get posts from Rara instead, she's got some awesome Easter designs to share with you all. I'll still have internet access and be checking in though, so keep commenting and saying hello =)

~Nail Art Novice~

Title of post taken from Wait-The Sweeney Todd Soundtrack

Wishful Thinking

Spring is taking a long time to appear in Britain at the moment and it's really cold. This coupled with the fact that I've got a horrible head cold and am generally feeling a little worse for wear at the moment meant that I wanted something fun to put on my nails that might make me feel a little better. Rara came over the other night and we both decided to do some spring-inspired nail art. We were originally going to do the same thing but had different ideas in the end and did two completely different, but both awesome manis.

Firstly, polishes used:
Rara: Sally Hansen Insta Dry; Brisk Blue, Colour Me; Colour Me White, Barry M; Lemon Ice Cream and L.A. Colours Art Deco; Black
Me: China Glaze; For Audrey, London Girl; Shade 148, Rimmel I Heart Lasting Finish; Tangy Tangerine, Colour Me; Colour Me White, OPI; Suzi Loves Cowboys, Barry M; Mushroom and OPI; Don't Mess With OPI.

Although we didn't copy them exactly, we both took inspiration and techniques from this sky/clouds tutorial by Nailed It NZ and this cut out sunshine one from Gnarly Gnails.

The Manis
I started with For Audrey on all my fingers except for my thumb, which I painted with the yellow London Girl polish. Because I wanted this to be my sun, I sponged some orange on top to change the colour slightly. Next I did the clouds with a dotting tool, then the trees and flowers using nail art brushes and the ones in the polishes. I added a little bit of the lighter brown Mushroom over my Suzi Loves Cowboys to give the trees some texture and stop them being quite so dark before doing the suns as in the tutorial above.

Rara started with a base of Brisk Blue then added the clouds and birds as in the tutorial on all but her accent nails. She painted her suns on using Barry M Lemon Ice Cream which is a paler yellow than the one I used, then added the details again using nail art brushes.

We were a bit bored and messing around and decided that you definitely needed to see some pictures of them both together too (I promise I'm not just crushing her hand in the last one!) and you can see the differences in our nail shapes here, Rara's are much longer and thinner whilst mine are broader but shorter. Both lend themselves well to different styles of art though!

I loved Rara's little birds that looked like they were flying across her nails and the cutout suns impressed me too. I think they look pretty spectacular, both of them, although I'm really sorry to say mine have all but come off now, which is sad. I enjoyed having spring themed nails, even if it was still snowing!

Let us know which one you prefer in the comments!

~Nail Art Novice + Rara ~

My First Mani...Snowy Days

Today it has been snowing heavily in Britain, and I wanted to do a snow inspired manicure because of this. I have the perfect polish in my collection for this, so all I needed was some base colours, which were fairly easy to choose.

I started with my normal base coat- Sally Hansen Double Duty which I noticed was sadly getting a little sticky and gloopy-time to order some more I guess!
The colours I chose were Barry M-Denim and a London Girl polish which doesn't have a name but is a pearly white colour.

I have a large collection of Barry M polishes, and I think for what they cost they're very good quality and fit perfectly into my budget! Denim is a surprisingly dark blue colour-like the colour of dark jeans- with small silver shimmers in and it went on very easily. I only needed two coats for full coverage and I could have easily got away with one. It's quite matte when it dries though, which I'm not a fan of, but it looks beautiful with some shiny top coat on.
The London Girl polish is a bit of an odd one. I got an online offer for 24 bottles of nail varnish for £20 which I didn't really think I could pass up. Although the colours are fantastic, the quality of polish isn't great and they take a long time to dry completely. I do like this pearly white colour, it's very shiny and pretty, but takes about 4-5 coats to reach opacity. Unfortunately I didn't take a picture at this stage, sorry! I've got the blue one my left hand, with a white accent nail and vice versa on my right.

Finally, I topped them off with my snowy glitter polish- Snow Daze by Absolut Lacquer, which is my favourite favourite Indie polish maker on Etsy. She's got great prices and really awesome polishes, and is kind to her international fans and doesn't charge extortionate shipping rates-plus she's really lovely and goes out of her way to give great customer service. I cannot recommend her enough!
Snow Daze is a blue glitter topper with lots of white glitters in-small squares, large/small hexagons and bars which look like snow in a pot! (Hence the reason I chose it!). It goes on really nicely, although I moved some of the big glitters around to get them more evenly spread out. I used one coat on each nail, and then a top coat of my trusty Seche Vite Quick Dry.

Here's the finished result:

Apologies for the messy edges, I tidied up as best I could!

I think it's a really pretty manicure. I just hope the snow lasts as long as the nail varnish will!

What do you think? Have you got any snow inspired manis to share? Let me know =)

~Nail Art Novice~