Roses

My nails are getting loooooonngggg - which means more space to put nail art on!

These designs are taken from the Wah Nails Book of Nail Art, which I was very lucky to get for Christmas. It's an exact copy, apart from the colours, so I take exactly zero credit for the design!

I've been putting off trying to do this flowery look for a while, basically because it looks really hard, but the step by step in the book made it look kind of do-able and actually it turned out to be one of the quickest and easiest manicures that I've ever done.

If, like me, you thought "that looks way to hard", please give it a go because this type of nail art doesn't have to be perfect, in fact it looks more realistic if the flower aren't exactly circular and if the detailing isn't completely uniform.

The technique was so simple - I painted the pale pink base coat and then added three different coloured blobs, just using the end of the nail varnish brush. I purposely tried to make the blobs irregular shapes. Then I just created random lines around the blobs with a black nail art pen, trying to make them look rose like. 

This was my first go at using the nail art pen and I was quite impressed with the consistency and precision.

Polishes used:
Pink background - Soap and Glory - Pink Soda
Dark Pink flower - OPI - Pink Flamenco
Purple flower - Models Own - Grape Juice
Dusky Pink flower - China Glaze - Fifth Avenue
Black Details - Primark nail art pen - pack of two, pink and black
Also base and top coat - Seche Vite and OPI

Stripey nails

I had the idea in my head for these nails for a long time from a very strange source of inspiration, which I'll get onto a bit later.

I originally imagined the stripes to be a little wider and to have more pink showing than black, but after doing them freehand and completely failing at doing the stripes in a straight, uniform line, I decided to use striping tape which was really thin but produced really nice, crisp lines. It was a bit fiddly but I think I got better at it as I went on.


Basically I painted my nails pink, added the striping tape, painted black all over my nails and quickly pulled the striping tape off. You need to wait around 10 seconds before pulling the tape off just to make sure that the polish has dried enough that it won't run when you remove the tape and that it will stay in a nice, straight line.

Polishes used:

Pinkink - Model's Own Fruit Pastel Collection - Strawberry Tart (which is scented like strawberries!) Black - Essie.

Oh and the inspiration :-)