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 - inspired by art

A while back I saw some very cool manuscript nail art from Break Rules Not Nails. I wanted to try something similar for this challenge. A while back, I'd stumbled on an article about a popular and charmingly odd medieval manuscript theme: knights fighting against snails. I found an image I thought I could fit on my nails from an article about knights and snails called Snail Jousting. The article talks a bit about the role of knights fighting snails, and the blog Hunting For Snails has more images and more information if you're keen to learn more.

Here's the image I chose:

Knight jousts snail, Frontispiece to Le livre des enseignments des visces et des vertus France, N.(Picardy)(From the British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts)

I started by painting my nails white, as the decals are a bit transparent. I took the water decal I'd printed earlier of the illustration, cut it to fit on each nail, and then topcoated it to stick them on. I finished with OPI's matte topcoat to match the pages of a book.

Because my nails are so curved the image is not a smooth from one nail to the next as I'd hoped. Still, medieval knight vs. snail art on my nails = sweet.

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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 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 - Geometric

I got a nice water decal sheet from Born Pretty Store (QJ-247) which I've been waiting to use, and this challenge is the perfect time.

To prep for the transparent decals, I painted my nails white with Essence Wild White Ways, which I bought after Gelic recommended it - it's amazing, I only had to use one coat! And so cheap! :D

I then used Revlon's Black Magic for the other nails.

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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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Animal print

Keeping it simple with some flamingo stamping (MoYou tropical 05) over Kester Black's Periwinkle. I mixed things up with a new claw hand pose.

Not sure how I'll get on tomorrow because I burnt my finger cooking dinner. :( hopefully it heals up quickly.

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More dot than polka dot - I attempted a dot-and-negative space mani but it didn't work out, so I went to an old favourite.

I painted my nails white using OPI's Alpine White, after Buff & Polish suggested it on my mani for the Black and WhiteBlack and White challenge - I realised I already had it in my collection. It definitely worked better, at two coats instead of three. I'm also going to check out some of the other suggestions; both Gelic and Buff and Polish suggested Essence polishes so I'm going to head over to Priceline tomorrow and try to snag a bottle.

I then used my dotting tools to dot on orange (Face of Australia's Some Like It Hot), grey (OPI's Embrace the Grey) and black (Ulta3's midnight). Done! 

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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 - rainbow

I'm trying to continue branching out from just plain stamping, so today I made some stamping decals using Lily Allen plate 07. I then coloured it in using Essie's Twin Sweater Set (red), Face of Australia's Some Like It Hot (orange), OPI's I Just Can't Cope-a cabana (yellow), Sally Hansen's Just In Lime (green) and Brisk Blue, and China Glaze's Grape Pop (purple).

In hindsight, I wish I'd used brighter colours - the purple in particular is too dark. Ah well. I might try using some smaller decals later in the challenge instead of trying for a full nail look, as clean up was a bit of a pain.

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31 Day Challenge: black & white

I love black and white - it's very striking - but it's also so unforgiving! No matter which white I use, I always seem to wind up doing 3 coats, and it takes a while to dry. Maybe I've just psyched myself out about white? Which white do you use?

I painted my nails white with Celestial Cosmetic's Snow Clouds (nice and easy to work with) then stamped over it using Cici and Sisi plate 06. I find that it's really hard to clean up my black Mundo de Unis stamping polish, so I used some liquid latex to paint around my fingers and form a peel-off barrier. This makes clean-up for much faster and more effective, but the smell is quite off-putting and you can be allergic to the latex. Happily for me I have a cold at the moment and can't smell anything. (Well, as happy as you can be with having a cold?!) 

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