Mint/Pink Gradient for Spring!

Hi everyone!

I was so in the mood for Spring that I really wanted to do a gradient with bright colours. Then I saw this gorgeous gradient by The Lacquerologist, and I immediately knew I wanted to recreate it :D

Cuties for Becca!

Hello everyone!

A little bunny told me today is Becca's birthday! You might all know Becca from Not Your Average Nails already - I did a mani swap with her a few months ago! If you don't, get your ass over to her blog and be baffled by all her amazing designs.

Her friend Brit contacted me on Tumblr and asked me if I wanted to do some celebratory nail art for Becca's birthday. I'm always in the mood for this type of thing! Plus, Becca is super nice so she deserves some birthday love!

I didn't want to do something really birthday-ish with balloons because I had to wear these nails for a few days to work. So I decided to show Becca my love by recreating one of her designs!

Wild Zebra Hearts - Recreation of Nail Polish Society

Hello my polish loving friends!

In today's blog post I'll be showing you my recreation of an awesome design by Nail Polish Society - you can see hers here. 

Nimbus Nail Art (The Nailasaurus' technique)

Hello all!

For today's design, I recreated the Nimbus Nails from The Nailasaurus. Mine look a bit different from hers but I looooove how they turned out!
I used The Nailusaurus great tutorial, which you can find here.

Everything is explained very clearly in her tutorial, so I will not elaborate here on how I created these nails as I just followed her tutorial. I did however change one thing: instead of acetone, I just used nail polish remover to thin the polish (because I don't own acetone, to be honest).

I think that because of the remover, my design turned out a bit different: the layers of polish are not so thin as The Nailasaurus' layers are. I don't mind this at all however, because I adore how these nails turned out!

I used my new purple polishes fom Guylond, which unfortunately do not have a name - I bought them in a "create ombre nails" pack together. The one big polish on the left is nr. 12 from Hema.

I also added two gold studs because I like the combination of purple and gold :)

So, do you like these? They were definitely a lot of fun to make, so I will try to create these again with some other colours!

Thanks for reading!

Blue Shimmer Nails #2

Hi everyone!

Just a quick post for today! I did these blue shimmer nails a few days ago when I didn't have a lot of time to create an intricate nail art design. I had already done this design before (you can see it here) so it was easy to create again :)

For this design I used:
Black on Black - Sinful Colors
DS Lapis - OPI

It's very simple to do:

First I painted my nails black with two coats.
Then I put some DS Lapis onto a piece of paper and dabbed in it with some plastic wrap I had rolled into a little ball. I then just dabbed this onto my nails and added a shiny topcoat (because DS Lapis dries to a matte finish with sparkles in it).

I added some studs on my ring finger and that's it!

I hope you like it! And I hope you don't mind my recreating a design I did earlier - when I don't have a lot of time I just do something very simple or something I have done before and really liked. And I did realllllly love this design!

(plus, this post made me realize that I am getting better and better at taking pictures and editing them, right? I can really see the difference with the pictures from a few months ago)

Thanks for reading!

The Great Gatsby Nail Art

Hello all you great people!

I'm suuuper proud of today's design :D

I did The Great Gatsby inspired nails, and I love them a lot!
I always loved Great Gatsby nail art, I thought it was so elegant. But when the big hype about The Great Gatsby movie was around, I felt that I wasn't skilled enough to make such pretty nails.

But now I've decided that it was about time I tried them, and I'm very happy I did :)

I loved The Great Gatsby movie a lot - I even went to see it twice in the cinema - but I hadn't read the book until recently. I had to write a paper about the book so it had to analyze it in detail, and I fell in love even more with The Great Gatsby.

So I was convinced I had to make nail art based on the cover of the book and movie :)

The colours I used are:
11 - Hema
Goldfinger - Catrice
Black on Black - Sinful Colours

My design is based on Polly Polish' tutorial. I thought it was so fun that she first did a silver and gold gradient, so I decided to do that for my design as well.

I did this gradient using a sponge. I applied a fast drying top coat and then I used striping tape to create the design.

The design on my ring finger is based on the one by Polly Polish; the designs on my other fingers are my own creation.








I just put striping tape on my nails and made sure my nails were properly covered. Then I painted over my nails with black polish, and while the striping tape was still wet I took it off with tweezers.

And that's that really :)

Of course there were a few spots where a little black polish had come onto the gold and silver lines so I had to clean this up a bit, but overall this was a very succesful atempt at using striping tape - this was actually the first time I have managed to work this well with striping tape :D

Those of you who have read the book or seen the movie, you know to what light my green ring is referring to! :)

And a final shot with my Great Gatsby book! (yes, it's the Dutch translation because that one has the nice gold striped cover - I also have the book in English but with a completely different cover, so the Dutch one was more appropriate here)

What did you think of The Great Gatsby? Did you go see the movie or have you read the book?
I hope you enjoy my nails! :)

Thanks for reading!

Recreating an artwork - 'Heist' by Earph

Hi everyone!

Today I have a design for you that's a bit out of my comfort zone.

I knew I wanted to do something with triangles, but I wasn't exactly sure what. So I googled images to get some inspiration, and I came accross this picture (which I found here):

'Heist' by Earph (Matthew Williamson)

I really liked the white and red smoke around the triangle, so I decided to adapt this image a bit and recreate it onto my nails.

The colours I used: Black on Black - Sinful Colors;

Big Apple Red - OPI; Chinchilly - Essie; 

FM1 - D'Orleac; Matt Effect Top Coat - Gosh

I started by painting my nails with a coat of Black on Black and let it dry.
After this, I used a small plastic bag to create the smoky effect. I put on blobs of black, grey, white and red and immediately covered my nail with the plastic bag. I pressed on it (but don't shift it from its place) and took the bag of.

I touched up a few things (put some extra black on the side of my nails, mostly) and added a matte top coat. Then I simply painted the triangles with a thin brush and tadaam, that's it!

Now that I think about it, another technique that would probably also have worked for this is dry marble, but I didn't think of it at the time. But this "plastic bag" technique also works well to create the smoky effect, I think.

I'm quite liking this design. It's the first time I tried to recreate an artwork (well, except for some Mondriaan nails I did once) so it's something I normally don't do. It's not a perfect recreation of the artwork of course, but I like how it turned out. Maybe I'll try to recreate another artwork some time in the future!

What do you think? :)

Distressed Nail Art (Chalkboard Nails' technique)

Hi everyone!

I loved Chalkboard Nails' distressed punky nail art so much that I just had to try it for myself, and I am sooo liking the result on my nails!

I followed her super easy tutorial to make this design, it's really amazingly simple and it looks so cool!

The colours I used here are:

FM1 - D'Orleac (white)

MATE 01 - D'Orleac (orange)

Black on Black - Sinful Colors

Miss Minty - Gosh

Lapiz of Luxury - Essie

Amazing California Love - OPI

I think these colours look really great together in this design! I didn't always use all of the colours: on my thumb, middle finger and pinky I used the pink, blue and mint green; on my index finger and ring finger I used pink, blue and orange.

What do you think? Has any of you done this design yet? I'm really loving it, this is definitely a design I'll be doing a lot!

Thanks for reading!