Winter/Christmas nails no.1

Hey, I hope everyone is well in this cold weather!
As it is nearly december ie. CHRISTMAS I thought I'd start cracking out some wintery/christmasy nail art woohoo!

We have this little craft shop in Ipswich called Craftability and it's the most amazing place, I shouldn't really be allowed in there as I spend ages looking at all the glitters and rhinestones etc and I always end up buying things haha. At the moment I have literally zilch moola as I'm an overspending student :P yet somehow I still managed to come out of said shop with 7 tubes of glitter and one tube of blue flakes...they were all cheap though :D I had to buy them as they were perfectly wintery!

So my first official winter nail art is using one of those glitters and a new Barry M that I only just got which I should have got ages ago cos it's amazing!!
I did one coat of Barry M Silver Diamonds which I believe is a massively cheaper version of China Glaze Techno weehee, it's so gorgeous, tiny and large holo glitter mmmmm. Then I sprinkled the loose irridescent glitter over in a fade kind of way then finished off with another coat of Barry M. This was so gritty that it took 3 thick coats of topcoat to slightly smooth it out but that's because I used loose glitter. I LOOOOOVe the end result, it's so pretty and sparkly and looks like I dipped my fingers in ice :D

 

 

 



 That's the glitter in question, £1.99 for the whole pot, I only used a tiny bit for this so I imagine it'll last forever!

 

I hope the pictures feel all icy and cold, I love this time of year so much, I'm looking forward to going home for a couple of weeks over christmas. We break up on friday 21st! And we have an essay due in :(

Seeyou sooooon!

Nail art with OPI Just Spotted the Lizard

Hi!

Today's post is something a bit different than my usual posts in the fact that it ties into an upcoming dvd release: The Amazing Spider-Man is out on Blu-ray and DVD on 26th November and for the occasion I have created Spiderman themed nail art using two colours from OPIs The Amazing Spiderman collection.I have used similar colours to Just spotted the Lizard but now I actually own it I thought I'd give that a try, I mattified it and it looks gorgeous! I mattified it as it's too sparkly and you can't see the black lines over the top. When I got the colour all I could think was I have to do a scaly design to represent the lizard character in the film. I did this by simply drawing random shapes and then colouring in the joins to represent shadows between his scales, I used my Models Own Nail art pen apu.

The ring finger is meant to be his claw but it didn't quite work out but I wanted to get Number One Nemesis into the design somehow, again I mattified it and it looks lovely like stone! The thumb is based off a picture of his scary face, I thought his eye on its own is pretty creepy, like him :P.

I have to apologise for the photos...I ran out of light to take photos with, so they were coming out blurry due to the long shutter speed so I'll take some better ones tomorrow morning and put those on either as well as these or in place of. 

I really like the way this design looks actually, when I was doing it I thought it might look a bit too halloweenish but I can see me rocking this ;).

Hopefully I'll seeyou soon!
Let me know how you like this design :)

Snakeskin nail art

Hi,
If you've read this blog for a while you'll know that 1) I loooove Macaroons and 2) I've wanted to do snakeskin print for aaaages. Tonight's post has both of these things yay!

So all I've done here is 4 coats of Barry M Nude then I simply drew lots of little diamonds in random patterns to look like scales using a nail art pen, my fingers hurt after this one :P. I think it looks pretty cool ;).

 

My sad naked index finger :( that I had to file down, the tear is slowly moving towards the tip of the nail as it's growing but it's still so short compared to the rest! :( grow faster!

 



 

 MMMMM Pistachio and Coffee macaroons....I have included these as I can't get hold of them in Ipswich but my boyf went to London for uni and he suprised me with these went he got home!! How sweet, I wasn't expecting it at all...he's the best :) ^^

 

I have a post planned for monday/sunday so look out for that!

Have a good weekend everyone, tomorrow I'm off to the zooooo woohooooo

Houndstooth and glitter leopard

Hi, I don't know how long it's been :( I'm really sorry that I haven't been blogging or commenting lately, just really long days at uni plus too much work means I have hardly changed my nails and there's not enough daylight to take photos with either :(.
I'm trying to get back into it I swear!

For now I'm back :P
I loved my two houndstooth nails so much that I had to do a whole manicure of it, but I wanted to maximise the amount of designs I'm doing at a time so I only did one hand, the other I did glittery leopard print!

My index finger looks funny as it's not my actual nail, instead it is a kind of cast of my former nail made from layers of tea bag bandage from my rip :(. For some reason after I'd taken my cast off I decided to just cut my nail down to the rip.....worst idea ever, it's so short now :( it has grown a fair bit but when I show it you tomorrow, you'll see it's still short though. Anyway to protect my nail dignity I rebandaged my nail and then stuck the cast onto it with topcoat and then painted over the top of the old design. Soooo much effort but the cast didn't last long, it soon started to bend at the end so I took it off the next day after this photo was taken :/.
Boo.
The gold is Barry M Gold Foil topped with three coats of Barry M Gold Glitter which will never be opaque but it looked okay layered over the gold foil.

I love love love the houndstooth though!! It just looks cool y'know.
I've entered the houndstooth, my Lightning Storms and my Galaxy nail art into the Barry M nail art competition to win either £100, £50 or £35 worth of Barry M goodies!! I'm sure I won't win but it's still good to enter for exposure purposes ;).

Seeyou all again soon (if you're still here :P)

Geometric mix up nail art

Hi! My titles are really lacking :P but it gives you a good idea of what to expect ;). So for a while I've admired girls who can do mix up nails really well as each time I tried to think of different designs I just couldn't think of designs that would flow, and don't get me started on the colours! The oher day I sat down and thought about it, I chose 7 colours that go together and then thought of the theme of geometric.
At first I got a few nails wrong but the second time designs are always better :P. My reason for choosing geometric was that I've been dying to try out houndstooth! I enjoyed making all the designs especially my middle fingers, the houndstooth ones and the Mondrian inspired nail ;).

For all these nails I used the long fine brush which I like at you can create good flat edges or small points. For the black lines I used a black striper and same for the white lines.
The colours I used are:
Left hand
Little Finger - Barry M Blueberry Ice cream
Ring - 17 Mini Skirt
Middle - Illamasqua Nomad
Index - Dior Lucky

Right hand
Middle - Models Own Purple Poppy
Index - Urban Outfitters, it has no name but I'm pretty sure it's the same as models own Disco Mix but I'm not sure.

I really enjoyed doing these nails, the houndstooth is surprisingly easy as all it is, is a square with two lines then an egg timer shape at the top :P.. I like the Mondrian inspired nail as it's quite eye catching with the bold black lines :). I used the glitter on my index finger as that finger is still bandaged up so I figured normal polish wouldn't go smoothly on top as they aren't lying flat. It's a nice glitter, it went on really easily and this was opaque in three coats.  

I'm off to a fireworks display tonight for bonfire night which is always fun, it's nice and cold so I get to wrap up in layers and get a hot chocolate and eat hot dogs...but no hot dogs as I don't like them :P it's also a chance for me to take out my little olumpus trip and take some sneaky photos of people ;)

How lovely is it? I love the snakeskin ;) I've loaded her with black and white film and I hope to get some good shots that I can process at uni on monday :).
Have a good weekend everyone!