Black and White & Gold Leaf

Today I wanted to play with another of my new goodies: gold leaf! Next up in my 31 day nail art challenge was black and white nails, so, of course, I combined the two!

Black was Union Jack Black by Butter. A gorgeous high gloss creme, this applies easily and coverage with two coats is amazing.

White was White Shatter by OPI. I know shatters are over, but I wanted an easy way to get the black and white effect as I knew I'd be messing around with the gold leaf.

And, a gold leaf tip! It's not smooth, but I think that's because of the shatter. Once I got confident with the leaf it was easier than I expected. I used a damp soft nail art brush to pick it up and apply to the nail, over wet top coat. It cut well with regular scissors. It definitely responds to a confident touch. This is not a nail art effect for the impatient!

I like it! I couldn't have achieved this gold colour with any polish. And I do love a bit of bling! What do you think?

Inside, in natural light.
You can see the bumps where the shatter has split.

Violet & Flocking Powder!

I'm at home this week on doctor's orders to take it easy, which to me translates as 'nail art time'!

I've just received some goodies from the lovely Jo at SimplyU (www.simplyu.net.nz), and today was the day to play with flocking powder! I've seen this online a lot, and agree it looks like plush animal fur: so when I ordered the powder I bought some acrylic animal embellishments too.

I did the flocked nail first to see how it went.
This is inside in natural light.

And here it is!


I used OPI Do You Lilac It? As its a perfect colour match for the purple powder, and it got me back on track for the nail art challenge. I only did one feature nail with the flocking powder, and I think it's super cute! What do you think?

All done, in the bright sunlight.

Tranzitions polka dots

One more post for today. Obviously I haven't been terribly good at keeping this blog up to date, so every now and then I need to purge my photo library of nail polish photos and share them with the world!

This is a design I tried when I first got my China Glaze Tranzitions polishes. It was surprisingly difficult, given my success with the Tranzitions stamping mani! Top coat isn't an ideal medium for nail art, simply because it dries so fast.

A simple polka dot design using China Glaze Tranzitions Modify Me and a dotting tool. Not fabulous up close, but the general effect is a good one. I hope you'll agree!

China Glaze Tranzitions and Konad Stamping

I love the cheats that the nail polish companies are coming up with! This is China Glaze Tranzitions. Possibly my new favourite polish, because I love the colours I've bought, and it's such a quick effective nail art technique!

This is me using the polish to best effect (ie: showing off)!

I started with two coats of Split Perso-nail-ity, and applied top coat to two-thirds of my nail.

Then I used a Konad plate to stamp a swirly design in Modify Me. This time, I only applied top coat over one-third of the nail (going over the darker pink side, so I still had some non-transitioned pink showing).

I was really impressed. Tranzitions polish stamped really well, and the stamped polish held up to top coat really well. It's quite a thick creme polish, so this was to be expected, but I was still expecting some blurring as the colour change worked its magic. I'm well impressed.

Graffiti nails - DIY version!

Inspired by China Glaze Glitz Bitz 'n Pieces, which is not yet available here in New Zealand, I tried to build my own graffiti glitter!

I used OPI Teal the Cows Come Home as my base colour. I wasn't sure if I'd love this look, so my glitter pieces are in similar teal blue shades. I used glitter rods, small squares, large hexagons and some paler stars. I used OPI Got Your Number Liquid Sand on my little finger as an accent.

No surprise, I found all that glitter really hard to wear! Even with two thick coats of top coat, it was super lumpy and caught on everything.

Photo 1: glitter and top coat, with flash.

But I liked the look. What to do? Easy! I applied a thick coat of clear UV gel over the nails. When that was set (after applying UV top coat also) I was free to file and buff the lumps away! It kind of enhanced the 3d glitter effect, and the iridescent large hexagons really popped!

Photo 2: glitter and gel nail, with flash, pre-filing.

Photo 3: gel all filed, buffed and smooth.
Artificial light - not true to colour, but shows the glitter better!

Verdict? Love it!