Craft night manicures

My friend from uni invited me over on Friday for a craft night. Since nail art is my craft of choice, I packed up most of my plastic tub on nail polish into a duffel bag type purse for easy travel. When I showed them my collection, all of the girls wanted manicures, but I only got to do two before leaving. Unfortunately I couldn't get great pictures because it wasn't great lighting.

I showed them my pictures from previous nail art and the first girl wanted a gradient with purple.

 The colours that I chose for her were Plugged-in Plum by OPI and Summer Rose by boe.

 The second girl wanted a rainbow manicure. I gave her a few options on how she'd like to have it done and she also wanted to do a gradient. The first gradient that I ever tried was also a rainbow and I'm happy to say that this one went MUCH better. I also love how the sponge gradient makes the orange and green out of just the primary colours.

The colours I chose were Scarlet by ulta3, Bananarama by Kmart, and Shark Attack by Sephora.

Stripes

I wasn't feeling up for doing my nails yesterday (although this post is backdated) and I'm glad that I didn't because I love the idea that I came up with today right before I did my nails.

The theme is stripes. I decided that I should finally use that fan brush that I've had since March when I got a pack of brushes from Born Pretty Store. I was super excited for that one to come and I just had never got around to actually doing anything with it!

My idea came from a green striped shirt that I have that kind of looks like the same sort of design that you get for a fan brush, but I didn't want to paint my nails green since I just did green polka dots. I decided to go with blues and purples instead.

I went with Bonna Blue from Fresh Paint for the base colour. The other colours were striped on in that order with the except of the first one also going on again as the last colour. They are Summer Rose by boe, Frostbite by China Glaze, Moonflower by Couleur inc, No Room for the Blues by OPI, and Plugged-in Plum by OPI.

I didn't bother cleaning up because I knew the mess about to come!

I started fanning on a few colours and took pictures of my progress. When I first put the brush down, it would give clumps of colour right where the brush set. I combated this by sweeping over the nail a few times and from both directions. This helped clear the puddles of polish and get colour across the entire nail.

After I finished fanning on all of the colours, I cleaned up my nails. I was surprised by how some of my pictures showed more purple and some more blue, so I included two pictures of the final product. I only did one hand today as I needed to catch up with the challenge.

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Violet

I was pretty sick on Saturday so I didn't have a chance to do my nails. Then I was busy on Sunday so I didn't get a chance to catch up until Monday! But since it's for a daily challenge, I'm backdating this blog post.

I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do for violet nails, so I looked at my polishes and chose Grape Icy by Revlon, which is a scented one but not one of the current parfumerie ones. I also chose Pink Diamonds by L.A. Colors.

I started with painting my accent nail Pink Diamonds. It took a more than a few coats to get it to show up enough that I was happy with it. I painted the others with Grape Icy and added the tape to my accent nail when it was fully dry.

I then painted over the nail and tape with Grape Icy. I realised that the lighting inside makes it look pink when I take a picture, so I went outside in the natural light. Usually it's late and dark, since it's winter, by the time I do my nails, so I was glad to be able to go outside. I shows a much more accurate colour of my nails.

I took the tape off and this is how it looked. I like the concept, but this Grape Icy was definitely the wrong polish to use. It kept smudging and not drying. I think it just dries at a slower rate than my other polishes. When I took off the tape, the Grape Icy polish sort of stretched and covered up the Pink Diamonds part. I used a pencil to separate it so that you could see the lines. I'll definitely do this design again, just not with the same polishes!

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Chevron

I chose to use some new nail polishes. I got them when I was in Sydney when my family was visiting for my wedding and they were on sale. Since I have a rule that I can't buy nail polish until I have a job, my now-husband bought them for me. He's pretty awesome like that. Both nail polishes are from Revlon and they are from an older version of the scented ones, but most of the labels have been worn off.

The purple is Grape Icy. That one smells so good! Most scented nail polishes don't have a strong scent until after it dries, but this one was a blast of grape right when I opened it. My husband even noticed. I tried to take a picture of just the purple on my nails, but neither with or without the light really captured the colour. It's a shame because I really like the colour. The one without the desk light (the first one) is probably a better indicator because it's a really vivid purple. The desk light made it look too pink.

I then added some chevrons freehand using a pink polish called Raspberry Rapture. That one smelled good as well, but the grape was definitely more fragrant.

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Lavender

Day 3 of the OMD2 is lavender and I had the perfect polish. It's Lavender Soap from Revlon and it smells like lavender.

I chose to use that as the base colour for my nails. I decided to do only an accent nail because I wanted to keep the scent and wasn't sure if the nail art would mask it. When sketching out my designs, I decided to do a swirls in a deeper purple on top.

My colours were Lavender Soap by Revlon Parfumerie and Pretty in Plum from Nicole by OPI's Selena Gomez collection.

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Easter part 2: Pastels

So I did a bit of cheating for this one. Or you could just call it smart. I did some skittle nails for today's design, but I actually did them a couple of days ago. Why? Well because they were the base colours of yesterday's manicure. I don't have a lot of options for pastels in my collection, so these were the best I got. My pinky is the temperature changing one, but I thought that the purple looked better with the rest of the nails since the blue was almost the same shade as my thumb.

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Easter part 1: Eggs

Since I'm doing two challenges (NAIL link up and the Challenge Your Nail Art on facebook) I'm going to be double dipping. The theme for the whole week for NAIL is Easter and the Challenge Your Nail Art has four themes for today through Sunday. Today's theme for Challenge Your Nail Art is Easter Eggs.

I decided that rather than have all of my nails be eggs, I've made my middle nail be the Easter bunny and my thumb a basket of eggs. The background of my pinky nail is the temperature colour change nail polish. I like it better when it was purple, but it was hard to get it cold long enough for the picture. I had to put my nail under cold water to get it to change and I didn't have time to wipe off the excess water because it would change back to blue in the time it took to do that.

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