Australia Zoo

We went up to Brisbane after Christmas because my husband's father's side is up there. We ended up going to Australia Zoo on the 29th, which I was really excited about. I used to love Steve Irwin and I love zoos and animals. Plus I got to hold a koala! (Queensland is the only State/Territory that still lets you hold them.)

I wanted to do a zoo appropriate manicure, but I had a limited amount of nail polish with me because I was travelling. I didn't have a brown, which severely limited my choices. I decided to go with a snow leopard. It's not exactly something that you'd see in Australia Zoo, but at least it's animal print!

 Here's some more pictures from the day:

Animal Print

I wanted to do an animal print that I hadn't done before. I've already done leopard, zebra, tiger, and cow so I didn't want to do those. My favourite animal is the koala and doesn't have a distinct print, so that was also out. Then I thought of my favourite animal from childhood: a giraffe!

I chose A-Piers to be Tan from OPI and Bananarama from Kmart.

I started by painting a yellow base. I discovered that the Kmart polishes aren't the best for painting your nails a solid colour. This is three or four coats. It wasn't very consistent with being opaque/translucent but since I was going to cover most of it with brown spots anyway, I wasn't too worried about how it looked as long as it wasn't too bad. The polish does work great for nail art, though, which is really all I can ask for from a $1 bottle of polish!

The next step was to add the brown spots. It was actually a really easy look to do and I was very happy with it. I thought that the yellow might be too bright when my nails were just the yellow, but I loved how they turned out once I added the brown.

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Animal Print

I went with a zebra print for my animal print. My friend had asked me to do this to her nails a while back, but she couldn't come over the day that we planned and then I was busy with my wedding. Someday I will get to do her nails.

I went with the design originally planned for her so I did a white base colour with black stripes only on the accent nail. I used White Lily from Ulta3 and an unknown black that I have in my stash.

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