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?

Simple Watercolour Flower Nail Art

I've been seeing a lot of pretty floral nail art on reddit lately (probably as it's Spring in the northern hemisphere) and wanted to give it a try myself. As it was my first time free-handing flowers I looked far and wide for a uncomplicated floral print/painting to inspire me.  I found this beautiful watercolour floral painting that looked adaptable to nail art on Etsy by Ilse Bernthal called "Blooms 7 blue". Pretty huh? Clicking the image should take you to the store.

To get a water colour look I first spotted the polishes I wanted onto a plastic dish, and filled a little dappen dish with pure acetone. I then dipped a small paint brush in the acetone (natural hair as synthetic brushes can be dissolved by acetone), then into the polish and swirled the brush on the dish to get a 'watery' consistency (adding more polish or acetone depending on if I needed more pigment or to dilute respectively). I then painted  swirly, circle-ish shapes that kind of look like flowers. Most of the flowers have 2 different polish colours (the second was used minimally around the outside of the circle/flower) and then an orange dot in the middle. I'm incredibly happy with how it turned out- I cant stop looking at my nails...I do wish I used a pastel blue as the background though.

The polishes used were:

Background: OPI Alpine Snow

Flower colours:-

Magenta: Sally Hansen Xtreme wear "Brick Wall"

Purple: Sally Hansen Xtreme wear "Purple Potion"

Dark Blue: Sally Hansen Xtreme wear "Blue it"

Periwinkle blue: Sally Hansen Xtreme wear "Pacific Blue"

Turquoise: Sally Hansen Xtreme wear "The Real Teal"

Orange: Sally Hansen Xtreme wear "Sun Kissed"

These will hopefully be the last cell phone pictures I use! I ordered a proper camera today- hoorah!! This next picture is especially blurry, but the sun was going down and its the best picture I got of the right hand =(

I took another picture with better lighting a few days later :)

Thanks for stopping by :)