Lilly Pulitzer Floral Nails

We are technically almost a whole month into Spring here in Perth, but it's been raining almost constantly with storms and such. On Saturday however, the sun was out and I felt inspired to do a Springtime floral manicure.

 I did a quick hunt through my Pinterest floral inspiration board and found a lovely Lilly Pulitzer floral print which I will post down the bottom of this page.

For these nails I first painted my nails with OPI "Funny Bunny'. This is a white jelly polish which builds to opaque in 2-3 coats. For me, at 2 coats I could still faintly see the nail line, but it looked.....nice.

In fact, I think I might prefer it to opaque creme white polish (I use OPI Alpine snow). It's not as stark white- it just looks so clean and jelly-ish!

Here's a pic of it before I painted the flowers.

Anyway, back to the flowers....

Over the white base I used Essie "A Crewed Interest", Revlon " Lilac Pastelle" and a little bit of China Glaze "For Audrey" to paint a messy base for the flowers (I kind of painted roses). I added a little bit of acetone to the brush when I did this to thin them down and make them more like watercolours.

Next I used a short striping brush to paint the flowers in a darker pink (This was a custom mix of a creme white polish and Seche Vite "Rendezvous" thinned with nail polish thinner).
They weren't too hard to paint to be honest as they are meant to look a bit messy.... which is good for me!
I started in the middle and worked my way to the outer petals. 

I then used a short spotter brush to paint the flower centres in Misa "Office Polish-tics".

The picture below was painted with my left (non dominant) hand. Not as good as the other hand, but I'm improving- practice makes perfect!

Oh and last but not least I filled in the background with some more acetone thinned China Glaze "For Audrey". (When I say acetone thinned, I mean I dipped the brush first in acetone, and second into my polish).

I really really love this manicure. It looks even better in real life when your not looking so close up!

I keep trying to pick my favorite nail- It's a toss up between the pointer finger on my left hand and the thumb on the same hand! (above)

This picture above is probably the best one, but I took it a day after I had finished the manicure, and the pinky nail seems to be all scratched. I really need to find a thin fast drying top coat for re-freshers before taking pictures. All I have is seche vite which can cause shrinkage when used on dry nails (and is also very thick). Does anyone have any suggestions?

And here is the print I used as inspiration.... or can I just say I copied it?

http://blog.lillypulitzer.com/2013/02/07/a-print-worth-celebrating-lucky-charms/

Thanks for reading :)

Chanfie
xx