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?

Matte Attack!

 About a week ago my Essie - Matte about you arrived in the mail- Hoorah! I immediately proceeded to try stamping over the matte polish to create a matte/shiny look. I chose a stamping design that wasn't too intricate with approximately even stamped/unstamped proportions, and stamped with Sally hansen diamond strength treatment base coat. I tried Seche Vite and Sally Hansen Mega shine, but they both seemed to dry to fast and therefore not stick all over the nail leaving flakey bits. I know lots of people have used a black polish to do this look which looks awesome and apparently works great, but I hate hate hate trying to clean up black polish off my cuticles and skin!
The second image was from 5 days later when I was getting bored of the manicure and had a mothers day thing that I was wearing a hot pink dress to (the background of the picture)- so I had to make my nails match. I got the "loveheart flowers" growing up from striping tape idea from a mani I saw on Pshiiit.com. This was a very quick and easy way to either dress up an old mani, or re-jig a mani to match an outfit if short of time!

OPI black onyx coated with Essie Matte about you and stamped with Sally Hansen diamond strength treatment (silver bottle). The image is from XL-N stamping plate from Magno nails.

Heart flowers from konad stamp plate M83. The striping tape and rhinestones are from ebay.