Aboriginal Dotted Nail Art

Hi there!

Today I have some nail art to share with you that I was very excited about (The 'was' because unfortunately they are long gone and I haven't had time to post).

I recently visited the Aboriginal art gallery at Kings Park (website here: http://www.aboriginalgallery.com.au/). As my partner and I wandered around the small gallery I was getting very excited by all the beautiful dotted art, which is the traditional visual art form of the Aborigines from the Western Australian Central Desert. The Aboriginal dotted art generally consists of lots and lots of dots which make up symbols and patterns associated with dreamtime stories. Bright colors are now more common with the use of acrylic paint, but traditional dot painters used natural pigments such as ochre, crashed seeds (ref).

Here's a small diagram with some of the more common symbolism (see above reference). From what I have seen over the years, one of the most common symbols used is the people sitting around a camp (well I guess it's a few symbols together). I thought it would be perfect for me to recreate on my nails!

I decided to go for a bit of a mixture between the traditional colours of oranges and reddish browns and the more modern use of bright colours. I love putting turquoise with earthy colours (or anything really) and I had been dying to use my Picture Polish Sea Jewel again since I did the Fremantle docker nails. 

The polishes were:

Background neutral : Butter London Yummy Mummy

Orange: China Glaze Life Preserver

Brown/red: OPI Skyfall

Gold: Sally Hansen Golden-I

Turquoise glittery suspension: Picture Polish Sea Jewel

I used the smallest dotting tool I could find for the majority of the dots and a small brush to paint the "people sitting" and the smallest dots. 

So what do you think? I absolutely loved these nails and I feel proud to contribute some Indigenous Australian nail art to all of the other tribal nail art inspired from people around the world. 

Thanks very much for stopping by :)

The promised tutorial: Marbled Gradient :)

This is just a quick post to add a tutorial that I made for a previous manicure I did. I have added it to that post but I realise that people rarely read older posts (I think?).

About a month ago I entered into a nail art competition on Bloom.com called "Peace Love and Nail Art" which had an amazzzing prize- the whole OPI San Fran collection and a pile of stamping plates and nail art supplies from Cheeky.  I thought I had won and was so excited, but later found out that it was only open to US residents (damn fine print). If you are a US resident I recommend keeping an eye out on Bloom for more competitions as they seem to have really good ones regularly. 

Anyway I was a little sad, but my spirits were lifted when they emailed me to offer the 'press' portion of the prize. I decided that I would make a tutorial for their blog :) 

The nail art that had received so many votes in the competition was the red to black gradient I did a few months ago, and also posted in my Halloween nail art ideas post. Here's a pic if you don't remember...

To do this gradient I used a different technique from the regular sponge gradient. I used a sandwich bag to marble :) I got the idea when I did a sandwich bag marble and one of he nails looked a bit like a gradient (an awesome gradient...). Here's that post.

Anyway, so here is the tutorial, Halloween themed to boot.

Thanks for visiting :)

Chanfie
xx