The Nail Challenge Collaborative presents "Skittles" 2 - Colour blocking

Hello everyone! Today I have a quick post with my second NCC mani for May. The theme for this month is skittles and I'm loving this month! 

I got my striping tape out for today and went for geometric colour block skittles. I started witha  white base and then taped off different shapes on each nail, before filling in the individual sections with either Cuccio Cheeky in Helsinki or Barry M Gelly Blueberry, Greenberry or Papaya, before finishing with Seche Vite.

I am so pleased with these, the lines stayed so crisp :) The colour combination isn't one I'd normally go for either, but I wanted to play with my new Cuccio and I think it works.

Sam xx

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FingerFood's Theme Buffet - Oriental

Hello everyone! HAving sat out last week, I'm back for the Oriental week of the Theme Buffet. This was suggested by Dawn from SassyLittleNails. I was really excited by this theme and was determined to step out of my Cherry Blossom comfort zone, so instead I bring you some Ming vase inspired nail art :)

Starting with a base of LA Colors French White, I painted on the outlines of the flowers, buds, leaves and other detail using Revlon Royal. I diluted it with a little acetone to get the "wash" effect. I filled in the flowers etc with OPI I Can Teal You Like Me from the Sheer Tints range and then, once dry, I added in the royal blue criss cross patterns with an ultra fine Sharpie. I gave the Sharpie a long time to fully dry before top coating with Seche Vite.

I must admit that I am in love with how these turned out! And using the Sharpie for the detail made life sooooo much easier!

Our theme for next week is something a little different. My daughter Scarlett is going to be 8 on the 15th May so our theme is "For Scarlett". She is already the biggest nail art fan girl so having a theme named after her is the highlight of her year so far! Whether its birthday related, inspired by something she likes (or that little girls like in general), or even just a scarlet mani, she is going to be beyond excited and I am so happy that the ladies in our challenge group are willing to get involved. Thanks gals! :)

Sam xx

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FingerFood's Theme Buffet - Fishtail ;)

Hello everyone! This week's theme in the Theme Buffet is Fishtail. I'm not going to lie to you, I've tried that technique two or three times over the last year and never once have I got more than halfway through a single nail before getting so bored and frustrated that I wiped it off and started again with something else. Its just one of those things that aren't meant to be.

Anyhoo, I had to think of a way around the theme that still fitted the prompt (also feeling glad at this point that I suggested people stretch the themes as far as they wanted!), so I painted fishtails, but more like the ones attached to my parents' Koi. 

I started with a base of Barry M Gelly Blueberry and LA Colors Flurry, and then painted in the white base for the tails in French White. Once dry I covered the white with Color Club Sparkle and Soar and painted in the details with Barry M Gelly Satsuma, Tangerine and a little more white. I added a little LA Colors Metallic Silver to the edges and a coat of Seche Vite to finish.

I'm actually pretty happy with the way that these turned out - flamey, abstract-y, fishy nails. The cremes, shimmers and glitters all worked pretty well together...

Next week is far more up my alley! I'll be back with something a little bit Goth for you - I have so many ideas for this that I don't know where to start! We might even end up with a Goth week if I can't rein it in lol!

Check out all the other fabulous fishtail manis from the ladies with far more patience than me! ;)

Sam xx

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A stamping obsession - it all starts right here...

Hello everyone! I am tying my Mother's Day nails for FingerFood's Theme Buffet together with my full and frank confession about stamping. Its a vintage floral that my Mum loves and has asked for as her next mani (she will happily let me paint her nails in any colour/pattern combo - despite being at the top end of her seventies!).

I have been painting my nails for years, been down with the whole nail art "thing" for a couple of years and blogging consistently for over a year now, but I have always resisted stamping, despite how much I loved looking at the awesome stamped creation of some of my nail buddies (some named and shamed in this recent post). I had a full set of BM plates that were okay but I've always been more into the idea of honing my freehand skills (at this point, I'm going to mention that this will not change), and got caught up in the idea that stamping is kinda cheating (I know, don't all shout at me at once!).

Anyway, I'm a sucker for a good gimmick and I saw the MoYou London plates and the packaging and immediately fell in love. Then I looked at the images and they caught my interest unlike any other plate had before. Finally I saw this mani by Canadian Nail Fanatic and that was it! I was on that site ordering plates and counting the minutes until they turned up. Yesterday they did - Pro XL plates 03 and 06:

I immediately went for a floral design in the top right corner of the 06 plate as I knew that I Could play with some jelly polishes and my OPI sheer tints. Here's how it came out stamped with Konad black:

I smudged the thumb a bit, but I'm not one for doing things over and figured that most of that would get covered up by the colour. I them added the OPI sheer tints and watered down a few other colours with acetone to add some depth. I Can Teal You Like Me with Color Club Bright Night, Don't Violet Me Down with LA Colors Edgy and I'm Never Amberrassed with a very watered down Barry M Gelly Mango. I used Sinful Colors Exotic Green for the leafy bits and finished with Seche Vite.

So I know it needs improvement, but I am very happy with my first attempt at this leaded light, painted porcelain effect. Plus I have a ton of lovely stamping images to play with to get the technique right.

Sorry to all those I doubted about stamping, I am officially a convert :)

Sam xx

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FingerFood's Theme Buffet - Freestyle Barry M Paisley

Hello everyone! I'm back!!! Sorry to say I missed out on last week's prompt - something had to give and I decided it was more polite (how very British!) to skip my own challenge rather than anyone else's! Anyhoo, I'm back, still under the weather, but with the super exciting news that I am now part of The Digit-al Dozen. You have no idea how thrilled I am - well, you probably do as I haven't stopped going on about it since I received the invitation, but its a big deal to me and something I aspired to, so it'll take me a while to adjust :)

So, on to today's prompt - Freestyle! I fancied a paisley so picked out a set of my favourite Barry M colours and got to work! The base is two coats of Greenberry. Once that was dry I painted in the paisley shapes in white and then dotted the border of each shape with Indigo and an inner border with Fuchsia. I then added in some little flowers with Tangerine and Cobalt Blue before finishing with Seche Vite.

So there you have some summery, neon-ish, freestyle paisley. Loving these and would love to keep them on for a while but duty calls :p 

Be sure to check out all the other fab freestyle manis - there are some great designs on show this week!

Sam xx

An InLinkz Link-up

Purple madness! GOT Polish, Theme Buffet and NAILS 31DC!

Hello everyone! Today I have a three in one post for you. This mani combines the GOT Polish challenge and NAILS Magazine 31DC "Purple" prompts, along with FingerFood's Theme Buffet "Dots and Stripes" prompt. The polishes are all over 1 year old, there are dots and stripes and its all purple, so therefore made of win!

The base is two coats of Barry M Gelly Prickly Pear. I then taped on a grid pattern and went over the whole nail with French White before carefully removing the tape. I added dots to each white space using a selection of my favourite purples (light to dark: LA Colors Wisteria, Electra and Edgy) and finished with a coat of Seche Vite.

I was able to use some of my favourite colours in this design and I love the fact that I managed to get it to line up for the most part!

So that's my three for the price of one post! I hope you like it. There are loads of links beliw to some gorgeous nail art, so be sure to check them out!

Sam xx

An InLinkz Link-up

An InLinkz Link-up

FingerFood's Guest Posts - Jeanette from Jeanette-ically Manicured

Hello everyone! Today we have a guest post that I am totally bowled over by - I adore this!!! Jeanette from Jeanette-ically Manicured has some gorgeous designs on her blog and she produced several of my favourite Valentines manis this year! Enjoy! Sam xx

Hey! I'm Jeanette from Jeanette-ically Manicured (#nerdalert) and I'm I'm so excited to be guest posting! And very honored to do this for Sam who introduced me to one of my favorite mani patterns of all time. (I tried to imitate it, it went poorly AND I forgot to photograph it. But I'll try again eventually.) I haven't guest posted before and I really wanted to do this post justice. I've been pretty proud of my roses lately so I thought I'd take it up another notch and add acetone to make a watercolor roses mani. The basic idea is painting normal roses, and then dipping a small brush in acetone and gently removing some of the polish to give the roses a watercolor look.

I love the result like crazy! I tried to google the method and I couldn't find anything quite like it. I can find watercolor nails where people use drips of acetone to make drops of polish look like watercolors and I've done that before and enjoyed the results, more or less. And then when you look for "watercolor roses", you just get painted roses. This is totes different!

Since I'm doing this post for Sam, I'm going to do it right. Look, I wrote down which polishes I used! The base is Revlon Blue Lagoon, a lovely sky blue with a shimmer in it, the roses are made with a red creme from Pure Ice called Siren, lowlights added in a burgundy creme from Wet n Wild called Haze of Love and then black with China Glaze Liquid Leather. I threw some leaves on there with Fingerpaints Go Van Gogh and Revlon Brilliant Strength Entice.  

I'll be creating a tutorial about how to make these at some point and putting it here. Hopefully I have it up by the time Sam posts this! I did these the Sunday after Valentines' Day, so I had a lovely bouquet of red roses from my boyfriend and since this manicure features red roses, I got all artsy with it. He likes it when I do artsy things (I think), so it was a double whammy of adorable to be all artsy with his roses.

I hope you enjoyed these and I hope you enjoy the tutorial! --Jeanette  

 

Nails at the Oscars - Meh...

Hello everyone! Something a little different from me today! Last week Julep got in touch and asked if I would be interested in blogging about the Oscars and the now famous red carpet mani-cam - obviously I immediately said yes! My husband is a director, and I know a little more about the film industry than I'd really like to, and with that has come a healthy disdain for the majority of the pomp, ceremony and self-aggrandizement that surrounds the Oscars. 

After thinking about it all for roughly ten minutes, I wondered what I had got myself into - I had a quick look through last years mani-cam photos and realized that I had absolutely no idea who half the featured people were, plus I don't follow fashions and trends so don't know what's supposed to be "hot". The majority of the nails I did see were "safe" (translates to "boring") and I also didn't think that some were particularly well painted, but that's another story (I'm keeping myself free for next year in case they want something tidier - I'll be happy to fly in and save the day!) ;)

Being in London and having to be up at 6am I didn't watch live and I am so glad I didn't! Here's a link to the mani cam video I watched this morning courtesy of E! Online. 

Nude, nude, more nude.Then Ooh! A bit of sparkle! And a stiletto tip! How daring! Many of the ladies seemed to completely miss the point of the MANI-cam and used it to push their sponsored jewellery but then again they are more suited to trotting out pre-prepared lines from a script or they'd be politicians/stand up comedians/someone who can think on their feet and entertain off the cuff. Instead most were looking over their shoulders for reassurance from their publicists that they were playing the part of being themselves to a suitable standard.

I was hoping for more nail art, or ANY nail art in all honesty. It was never going to fly though because as soon as Dior stump up a $10,000 dress, they're going to insist that nothing else in the picture detracts from it, so they're put on to undernourished, pale clothes horses and then the fabric looks great! Don't get me wrong, it didn't have to be a full on neon skittlette, or giant 3d acrylic flowers over zebra print in the season's least popular clashing colours, but would half moons have been so terrible? Or an accent nail or two? The fact that Lupita Nyong'o stood out for wearing pale pistachio nails, and Kelly Osbourne's usually fabulous nails were tamed to a tiny glitter tip just about says it all...

Kelly Osbourne

Lupita Nyong'o

I would've loved to see something like these nails below, but alas, there is a reason they don't ask me for my advice...

So, this might not have been the Oscar report that I had hoped to write. I was hoping to be proven wrong about many things, but am feeling slightly irritated at what I saw and smugly self satisfied at being right in my assumptions! 

Either the popularity of nail art is waning (which I'm certainly not seeing in the real world), or the celebrities are hedging their bets and trying desperately not to offend the sensibilities of the designers who grant them the use of ridiculously expensive dresses for one or two nights a year. Who knows? And, if I've learned anything by doing this, who cares? 
If I'm ever there to support my husband accepting an award (you never know - he's pretty good!), I promise to be wearing a very black dress and the most in your face nail art I can manage - something like this:

 

I'll have a new nail art post for you later, and its likely to be a big, full on, bright creation to help me get over the overwhelming levels of bland I've been forcing myself to look at so far today. Need to put the bitchy Brit back in the cupboard! Until then, keep up the good fight, Nailistas!!!

Sam xx

FingerFood's Theme Buffet - Abstract

Hello everyone! Its Abstract week over at FingerFood's Theme Buffet and as everyone knows I love abstract! I intended to go with one of my traditional swirly "out there" abstracts but then I did this mani (intending to use it for something else entirely!), and thought it would go well here!

I started with three coats of Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Deep Blue Sea and added a coat of Seche Vite. Once dry, I used a large dotter to create large dots on each nail, then added a smaller dot of white inside and another smaller contrasting dot in the middle. In between, I added smaller white dots with one inset colour. I would love to list all the colours I used in the dots for this mani, but the only repeated colour is LA Colors French White and this post would be waaaaaay too long! I left them to dry and finished with a final coat of Seche Vite.

I'm so in love with these and am planning on recreating them for the weekend! Well, I was until I sliced through my cuticle and the top part of my finger while trying to slice through a grape stalk today. No more pretty nail pics from me for a while lol - I'm so lucky I managed to build up my mani stash this week and I still have so many great guest posts on the way for you all.

Our theme for next week is "Cute". I haven't decided where to go with that one just yet, but we'll all be posting from Sunday so be sure to check out all our designs :)

Sam xx

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FingerFood's Theme Buffet Week 2 - Shapes/Geometric

Hello everyone! Today I have a Theme Week mani for you - for those of you that follow, I'm a little late posting this week but I hope its worth the wait.

I decided to test my patience as far as possible with many fiddly bits of tape (I think I'm now done with tape for the year and its only January!), because I thought squares would be cute.

I started with a French White base and allowed it to dry. Next I added three pieces of tape vertically down the nail and six pieces horizontally This was a tad time consuming - and not at all good for my OCD. Next was the fun part - I added (from tip to base) Barry M Gelly Blackberry, LA Colors Edgy, Electra and Wisteria and finished with Barry M Gelly Prickly Pear. I then carefully removed the tape and finished with Seche Vite.

Despite the fact that they took forever and it makes me angry and impatient just to look at them - I do like the way these turned out. They remind me of paint colour charts and I'm happy with the gradient effect of the colours.

Our theme for next week is Weather, time for something wild maybe? :) In the meantime, follow the links below to see the fabulous geometric creations by the other ladies in the group. And if you would like to join us, click here for all the details :)

Sam xx