31 Day Challenge - honour nails you love

I can't believe I forgot to post last night. :(

For this last prompt, I chose to do some "cut on the dotted line" nail art, as seen on the Daily Nail blog. I painted my nails white then free handed the lines & the scissors with a nail brush and some dotting tools.

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31 Day Challenge - tutorial

The penultimate prompt! We're definitely in the home straight now.

For this prompt I followed a Bokeh Circles tutorial by HG Nail Design.

I painted my nails white, diluted some blue acrylic paint with water, and dabbed it onto my nails in dots before using a cotton bud to mop up the excess water/colour. 

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31 Day Challenge - inspired by the supernatural

Despite the fact that we don't celebrate Halloween in Australia, I have a fair number of Halloween-themed stamping plates... such as the one I recently bought from MoYou. Slightly odd! But I love the whole lot of Halloween imagery.

For this manicure I painted my nails using Peita's Polish in Ghost Gutz, a lovely lurid green holo. I then stamping using MoYou's Festive plate 16.

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31 Day Challenge - inspired by a flag

Am I the only one who finds this a bit of an odd prompt? Although I did love seeing everyone's take on the theme last year!

A few days ago I went on a tour of the US Embassy here in Canberra. We saw some beautiful buildings, including the inside of the ambassador's residence, and toured the grounds. It was great. At the end we all got a show bag with a bunch of American themed items (American flag pen! American flag fan! American flag grill glasses!) and I just had to pay homage to America's enduring love affair with its flag. And it was a good chance to use some of my unused stamping plates... ;)

I painted my nails white with Essence's Wild White Ways, then stamped using plates BM-H25 (for the abstract flag and the eagle) and Winstonia W114 (for the Statue of Liberty). I used Mundo de Unas stamping polish - originally I used "Red" on the stripes, but it was a bit thin so I switched to "Reddish" instead and got a better result.

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31 Day Challenge - pattern

Some straight-up stamping. I love having matching patterns on all my nails.

This is Sally Hansen's Golden-I stamped with Born Pretty plate BPL-003.

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31 Day Challenge - Inspired by fashion

I was going through my stash of nail art supplies earlier this month and came across a bag of little Chanel logos, purchased so long ago I forgot I had them and can't remember where they came from. Possibly from Emily de Molly? #mystery

They totally inspired my for this challenge, so I did the classic black leather Chanel bag.

I painted my nails black (Revlon's Black Magic), waited for them to dry, and then used striping tape to mark out a grid on my nails. I then used Nails Inc's Leather Look polish in Noho (another black) and peeled off the tape - this gave it a great quilted look. Finally I used a wax pencil to position the CC charm on the end of my nails.

So boss! The charms were rather precarious and didn't stay on for very long, since they weren't top coated on. However, I think some nail glue would have fixed that if you wanted to create this look yourself.

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31 Day Challenge - inspired by a book

I couldn't resist. For this prompt, I unwrapped my MoYou Pride and Prejudice plate from the Literary collection.

I have mixed feelings about the plate. I love the books, and I love putting writing on my nails. Yet the way the typography is laid out makes it hard to actually get the full line of the quote to fit, and because everything is squished up together, it means you get a lot of excess stamping on your fingers (and even a bit on your nails). And the main image was hard to stamp - it wouldn't fit on one nail, but was laid out in a way that made splitting it challenging.

Anyone else have this plate? How would you fit the text onto your nails?

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31 Day Challenge - inspired by a movie

Earlier this year I went to see Mad Max: Fury Road, and I absolutely loved it. So I knew exactly which movie I wanted to do for this prompt!

I made a water decal using a promo pic of the two main characters, Imperator Furiosa and Mad Max, then painted the other nails black and stamped a chrome mechanical pattern using Born Pretty plate BPL-022.

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31 Day Challenge - inspired by a song

I've been looking forward to this prompt! I chose to do a mani inspired by the Box Tops song "The Letter":

Give me a ticket for an aeroplane,

Ain't got time to take a fast train.

Lonely days are gone, I'm a-going home,

My baby just wrote me a letter.

I painted my nails with Ciate's Sugar Plum, then stamped using plates:

Winstonia "On The Road" (aeroplane and tickets)

Cici and Sisi 01 (the clock)

Born Pretty Store BPL-021 (the couple)

Winstonia W102 (the love letter).

The train was a water decal which I made myself, and the heart on the letter was coloured in with Kleancolor Be Wild With Class.

I love having the colours of the stamping decal but I struggle with getting the topcoat thick enough to peel the decal off without getting too thick - i got some bubbles with this, frustratingly.

and here's a YouTube video of the song.

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31 Day Challenge - water marble

So I was putting together my post for today, rather late at night, when I suddenly twigged that today was not in fact Inspired By A Colour, but rather water marbling. Cue record screech moment!

Fortunately I had in fact done my water marbling a day in advance so that I would have time to properly clean up my fingers. *sweatdrop* I got back up, did a little more clean-up, and took some photos.

For this marble I used some polishes I made myself! :D It was a lot of fun. I really need to go to sleep so I'm not going to go into details tonight but I might update this post later - comment if you're interested.

My polishes! It's amazing his much you use in a marble mani.

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31 Day Challenge - inspired by a colour

Inspired by a colour - this time for real!

I was rustling around in my untried polish stash a while back and found Enchanted Polish's May 2014, an orange holo, and thought to myself how great it would be for Halloween nails.

I pulled out my MoYou festive plate 16 and stamped a Halloween design. I'm a fan!

In the sun

In the shade

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31 Day Challenge - galaxy

Galaxy nails today! I like that it comes directly after half-moons: very thematic.

I was gathering my polishes for this prompt and I noticed that two of them had food in the title, so I decided to only use colours that were food related. I love having little twists like that when I do my nails, like an inside joke with myself... and now with all of you. :)

I started by painting my nails black with the holo Brain Freeze by Glitter Gal, then used a little piece of sponge to add white (Celestial Cosmetics' Snow Clouds), purple (Ciate's Sugar Plum), pink (Ulta3's Fairy Floss), a dark maroon (Ulta3's Mulberry) and pale green (China Glaze's Re-Fresh Mint).

I finished it off by adding a constellation using a dotting tool and a nail art brush - Leo, my star sign. (Diagram from here.)

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31 Day Challenge - Half Moon

I used hole reinforcements to mark off the half moon, then painted my nails with China Glaze's Grape Pop. I finished off with some freehand outlining (Sally Hansen's Golden-I) for this look - I'm always a bit nervous to do any free handing! But it pushed myself for this challenge and it turned out fine (what a relief!).

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31 Day Challenge - Glitter

Glitter! I wanted to show off the sparkle by contrasting it with a matte finish. 

I painted my nails with Wet 'n Wild's SaGreena The Teenage Witch (love the name) then mattified it with OPI matte top coat. After it dried fully, I used some vinyls from Bundle Monster to mask off the matte part of the design, and used an unnamed China Glaze glitter polish to finish it off.

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31 Day Challenge - delicate print

Some quick stamping again - Emily de Molly plate EDM-06 over OPI Amaz-on...Amaz-off.

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31 Day Challenge - gradient stamped with MoYou Illusion

I made a gradient using Ulta3's fairy floss, OPI's Houston We Have A Purple and Ulta3's mulberry. At first I tried to do a scaled gradient buuut it really didn't work. So I did a straight-up gradient and then stamped over it with MoYou's Illusion 01. I'm a big fan of illusion stamping over gradients.

I used a different pattern on my right hand.

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31 Day Challenge, Day 3 - Yellow

Day 3! This wraps up the 31 Day Challenge for me, having now gone back and completely every day. I did each challenge on each day. It was tiring but also quite rewarding, and I certainly met my two goals of improving as a blogger and as a nail artist, and interacting more with other nail bloggers.

I've also decided to get an instagram, so you can now find me on instagram here. Same name! :D

For today's manicure. I was inspired by the "song" prompt from earlier (later?) in the challenge, so today's nails are brought to you by the song "Banana Phone".

 

So catchy! I'm a big ice hockey fan, and when I watch streamed games from the Melbourne Ice, they play this in the intermission. (I'm a fan of the CBR Brave though! And in the NHL, the Pittsburgh Penguins - their first game of the season is on the 8th and I'm pretty excited for it.)

I started by painting my nails with BYS' Sunshine. I wanted to use a different yellow to usual, to mix things up... but I remembered why I don't often use different yellows! This is five coats. I then stamped using Cheeky plates CH42 and CH53. I like the effect, and it's quite eye-catching - three people asked to get a better look at them this afternoon.

And that's a wrap!

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31 Day Challenge, Day 2 - Orange

The penultimate day! Exciting. I did some stamping over black with my new mundo de uñas orange polish (!!), using plate Bundle Monster BM-403. I've avoided using this plate because I was worried about getting the images straight, but this is a challenge, so I forged ahead. I'm pleased with how it went.

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31 Day Challenge, Day 1 - Red

Day 1! The theme is red and I'm taking advantage of the open-ended nature of the colour prompts by doing some stamping. A while back I ordered some stamping polish from Mundo De Uñas, and it arrived on Tuesday. I also got a new stamping plate from Lily Anna, and I wanted to try it out.

The Munde de Uñas polish is amazing! So opaque! It does have a rather strong and unusual smell (apparently an enamel paint smell?), but nothing too bad. The main drawback is that, being so opaque, it's a pain to clean up off your cuticles after stamping. In the comments to my water marbling post, Nerd With Nails suggested using chapstick to help with clean up, and I wonder if that would also be worth doing with this stamping polish.

I also love the Lily Anna plate, which gave easy crisp results. After painting my nails with Ciate's Boudoir, a red jelly, I stamped with Lily Anna 07. The star pattern is lovely and I already have plans for some reverse stamping with it.

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31 Day Challenge, Day 31 - Honour Nails You Love

For today's challenge, I decided to recreate some nails from More Nail Polish. More Nail Polish is one of my favourite nail blogs - amazing manicures (did you see the version of Nolan's Ned Kelly art for the challenge this year? Stunning!), handy swatches and reviews, and she uses a variety of techniques. She's also Australian, which is nice - I enjoy it when bloggers talk about popping down to Bunnings for some acetone rather than, say, Wal-Mart, a store that doesn't exist in Australia. But not only that! She's a fellow Canberran. Even her references to the weather are comfortably familiar.

Back in January, she posted some a manicure titled "Bright yellow reverse stamped flowers", which I loved. Coloured in stamping? It looked great!

From More Nail Polish - http://www.morenailpolish.com/2014/01/bright-yellow-reverse-stamped-flowers.html

To recreate this look, I used the same yellow polish, OPI's I Just Can't Cope-acabana. The white is OPI's Alpine Snow, and I used Bundle Monster's plate BM03 for the flower pattern. The nail studs are from Born Pretty.

So that's the challenge! I missed the first few days though, because I didn't know it was on, so I'll be doing days 1-3 over the next three days. I got my new Mundo de Unas polishes in the mail today (!!) and I'll definitely be using them for the Yellow day - a manicure that has also been inspired by a song. Stay tuned! ;)

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