A Few Halloween Nail Art Ideas for 2013

In nail art world October is an exciting time. Halloween themed nail art! 

Being an Australian, where unfortunately we don't get into the spooky holiday as much as the US, didn't stop me from getting excited and trying out different design ideas over the weekend.

First up I did a pumpkin patch feature nail. I think this is a good one for the lead up to Halloween if you don't want to go overboard with the blood, gore and monsters- save them for the big day!
The orange polish is China Glaze life preserver from the 2011 spring collection. This polish had a beautiful formula- thin but pigmented and smooth.
For the pumpkin patch feature nail I first painted my nail with OPI my vampire is buff. I then used some acrylic paints to paint the pumpkins and leaves/vines. 

This next one was definitely the longest and most work, but I recently got some new thin nail art brushes and wanted to try out some fine designs on my nails. 

Unfortunately I didn't get very good photos of them =( I was trying to get them right way up and my usual hand pose makes everything upside down. 

The background blue-grey-sky on a full moon night colour is Misa- "Office Polishtics". 

I then painted the moons with acrylic paint and then sponged over this lightly with grey, black and white to create what is meant to be spooky clouds. 

 There is a mixture of hand painted and stamping in the black. The trees are hand painted, as is the graveyard. I stamped the bats and wicked witch from a bundle monster 2010 collection plate. 

The next design I have to share is meant to be abstract candy corn. Again something Halloween themed without being overboard. All I did was redo the feature nail from my pumpkin patch mani and add some yellow and white glitter to the other nails. The feature nail was done with the sandwich bag marble technique (TUTORIAL HERE)  using China glaze life preserver (orange), China glaze sunshine pop (bright yellow) and Sally Hansen White on.

 

This last one is a mani I did a few months back, but I have seen it floating around Pinterest with Halloween captions (and a blurred out watermark - ungh!)

The polishes I used were:

China Glaze: Hey Sailor (bright red)

OPI: Kennebunk Port (Deep red)

Revitanail: Port wine (Metallic deep red)....mmmm Port

and OPI: Lincoln Park After Dark (Dark Purple -pretty much black!)

Once again it was done with the sandwich bag marble technique. (Tutorial here)

What Halloween nails will you be rocking this year? I haven't decided yet!

AFL Grand Final Nails! Go Freo!

Clearly my Freo nails last week at the Prelim final were very good luck as they won and are off to the Grand Final. This of course meant that I needed to think of some different Fremantle nails to last week (here). Now I really liked those nails, and considered just doing the away colour jersey (reverse colours- purple on white), but I wanted to be more creative. I chose to incorporate the red and green that they used to have along with the purple and white. Plus I really wanted to create a way to use my new picture polishes (Sea Jewel and Violet Femme).

 I again stamped the anchor from the bundle monster 2010 collection (konad white polish).

I used striping polish to create the different stripes/triangles. 

The polishes were:

Picture polish violet femme (purple), 

Picture polish seafoam (green glitter) 

This was painted over Sally Hansen Xtreme wear The real teal

And Misa Bop Til You Drop (coral)

 

It took ages, but it will be worth it tomorrow!!! 

I'm going to Fremantle to watch the game and I'm ridiculously excited =D

 Here is a picture from 2006 of the old team colours I was trying to channel

Source: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/afl/fremantle-dockers-survivors-chase-redemption-for-2006-preliminary-final/story-fni5f6su-1226719142368

 Thanks for reading :)

Freo Dockers Nails!

Well... I never ever thought I'd do 'sports nails' but here we are.

The West Aussie AFL (Australian Football League) team - the Fremantle Dockers is one game away from making the grand finals and it's a home game!

My parents are Freo Docker members and my Dad has abandoned my Mum for a private box leaving me with a ticket =D

I've been getting into the footy a lot this year. All the boys were always talking about their dream teams non stop at the start of the season, so me and a friend joked about making a 'dreamy team' where we would pick the most attractive players only...... and we ended up actually doing it.

I watched every game I could this year and I think next year I'll make a proper dream team :) I was getting so annoyed when I couldn't pick my favorite players because they weren't 'dreamy' enough!

So anyway, between going to the game and actually enjoying football in general, I guess that's how I ended up doing team nails :)

*Update* I did more Freo nails for the grand final here 

The team colours are purple and white (previously there was also green and red- but they seem to have rethought this colour clash!). I handpainted the lines instead of using striping tape. Partially out of laziness, and partially because I'm not very good at using striping take yet!

The logo is an anchor, which I luckily had a stamp for from the bundle monster 2010 set.

The polishes I used were:
White nail: OPI alpine snow
Purple: OPI Vant to bite my neck?
White stripes: LA colours striping polish

And here is a picture of the team (in 2012). As you can see I kinda screwed up and only did two chevron lines instead of three- but oh well- close enough!!

Source: http://www.watoday.com.au/afl/afl-news/reports-spoil-fremantles-massive-win-over-eagles-20120804-23mvs.html

Thanks for reading, and Go Freo!!

Great Gatsby Inspired Baroque Nails

I went to see The Great Gatsby a few nights ago and absolutely adored the fashion, colours and style of the movie. Anyway I was inspired to do my nails in a black and gold baroque-ish style :)

..Well I think the stamps I used are a baroque pattern. I may be wrong though!

I ended up doing the feature nails twice. The first time I stamped directly onto the nails, but I didnt get it very centred so covered them in black rhinestones. It was ok..... but the off-centred-ness was annoying me too much.

I then used the 'make your own nail decal" technique  to make black baroque decals and then put them on over gold polish. This way I could centre the design  :)

Polishes used were :

Sally Hansen Xtreme wear in Black out

Sally Hansen Xtreme wear in Golden-i

Essie: Good as gold (stamped)

and Konad Special Polish: back 

The rhinestones are from ebay.

The stamps were BM12 (the smaller ones on my thumb and non feature nails)

and the feature was from Big SDP-I 

Here are the original rhinestone encrusted feature nails: 

 And the re-done more centred feature nails :)

Which do you prefer?

How to use too small stamping designs!

This mani was from earlier this week and was my first time for 2 things! Firstly I have never done a proper striping tape mani before (Only a basic scotch tape). Secondly, I got to use one of the tiny tiny stamping images from the original (2010) bundle monster set- specifically BM19. I have had the set for over a year and never used any of the full nail images.... becuase they won't even fit my pinkie =(
I originally chose this set over the 2011 set (unknowing of the size differences) because I had to have this leaf design so I was super happy with this mani!
To do this I first painted my nails with China Glaze for Audrey (I seem to use this in every second manicure I do!) and went to bed - I tried to start the mani before I went to bed, but it wasn't dry enough and the polish was ripped up when I removed the scotch tape. Although... I wasn't happy with one nail in the morning and had to repaint it, and it dried enough in about half an hour to redo- this was with seche vite to dry it faster, and I also stuck the scotch tape to the back of my hand before using it on my nails to make it less sticky.
After the base colour was dry, I used scotch tape/sticky tape to cover up the areas I didn't want stamped with the leaves. I then stamped using konad red, and removed the tape to reveal a square/triangle of red stamped leaves. After this I used striping tape to tape around the leaves and to make stripes and painted the divided areas with China Glaze shower together, and OPI fly. I removed the Striping tape with the polishes were still wet, and painted over with Seche Vite.