31 Day Challenge, Day 19 - Galaxies

Apparently I've been living under a rock, because I had never heard of galaxy nails before. A short google later though and I was all across it. It's a pretty easy, fun manicure, although you do need a fair number of polishes.

I painted my nails with Revlon's Black Magic, then used a damp sponge (it does work better than a dry sponge!) to apply OPI's Alpine Snow, Maybelline's Green Park, Kleancolor's Metallic Fuchsia, Kleancolor's Boogie Nights (the orange), Crows Toes' Indian Summer (multichrome pink/purple), and Ulta3's Blue Marlin, plus a topper of Sephora X's Shifty (holographic glitter). Whew! More Alpine Snow was applied with a toothpick for the stars.

It was so colourful! So astronomical! And yet... I couldn't help but do a cheeky little bit of stamping with Cheeky plates CH45 and CH46. Rocket ships, planets, and some alien spaceships, oh yeah. They white means you miss them on a casual look, which I love - it's like a little Easter Egg.

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31 Day Challenge - Day 14, Flowers

Come on springtime! Floriade has just started here in Canberra, so I wanted to do some tulip nail art to celebrate it. (Even though the tulips are only juuuust starting to flower - I have one just opening in one of my flower pots. Exciting!)

I painted my nails with OPI's Alpine Snow, then freehanded the flowers. For the stems and leaves, I used Essie's Going Incognito. The flowers are Natio's Raspberry for the two outside flower points, and Maybelline's Ultra Violet for the inside point, with Butter London's Pillarbox Red for the flowers on the ring finger. Despite this, all the flowers look pretty much the same shade to me... ah well!

ETA: Tulip action shot!

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31 Day Challenge - Day 4, Green Nails - Sugar Spun Nails

I've hit the winter blahs, and although I've been doing and even photographing my nails, I haven't posted here for a while.

Chalkboard Nails is doing a 31 day nail art challenge, and I thought I'd kick-start my posting by taking part. Here's the full challenge list:

Day 4 is green nails, so I decided to pull out some polishes from my yet-to-be-used stash and have a go at a technique I've never done before: sugar spun nails. I used this tutorial by The Nailasaurus.

(Speaking of yet-to-be-used stashes - I saw someone proclaim on their blog that they were quite into nail polish, and as proof they offered up the size of their collection: 30 bottles of polish! While I agree that they're definitely a polish fan, I had to laugh, because my yet-to-be-used stash alone is easily over 30 bottles of polish! I know that quite a number of bloggers have multiple helmers full of polish. It's a whole different scale in the nail blogging community, for sure.)

For this manicure, I used a base of Revlon's Emerald City, which has a matte suede finish, and I used Chi Chi's Relax! Don't Do It and Maybelline's Green Park for the sugar spun drizzles.

The good: the texture of these nails is lovely, and I do like the look.
The bad: it took a long time for the polish to become goopy enough to even vaguely form threads, and it still wasn't quite right when I used it, as you can see by the thick lines. It's not exactly sugar-spun, but more of a Jackson Pollock effect. I'm not sure what went wrong (too dry? too wet?), but as a result it took quite a while to dry, and I'm still concerned about sheet marks.

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