I have another challenge mani for you guys today! It's day 13 and so it was time for some animal print. I wasn't sure what to do for this day as animal prints aren't really my thing that much, but still I had few different ideas of manis that I have never done. Finally I remembered that Sannu did some butterfly wings nail art for this day two years ago and I thought then that it was really a great idea, so I decided to give it a try, also because I haven't yet tried this style!
Yeah, I know, this isn't a traditional animal print, but butterflies are animals, so I think this goes, right?! I started this mani with two coats of KBShimmer Teal Another Tail (I'll show you the swatches some other day!). Then I did a gradient with that KBShimmer polish and Colors by Llarowe polish called Behead the Drama Queen. Then I painted the black lines and the white dots with my Oumaxi acrylic nail paints.
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My lines didn't really turn out too great, but then again, butterflies don't have such straight lines either... Lifting weights isn't the best thing to do before you are going to do some meticulous nail art, the hands can be a bit shaky, lol. But I still liked this look very much and this is really something that I have been meaning to do for quite some time already, so I'm really glad that I managed to do this now! I think they at least somewhat remind me of butterfly wings. Though I have to tell you that my bf though these were aqueducts when he saw these before I had added those white dots, lol. It's not the first thing I'd be painting on my nails, but what do I know... :DD
Btw, sorry about those water drops and snow on my nails and hands! It was so dark today that I had to go outside to take these pictures and it was snowing and raining like hell here...
But tell me guys, have you all already tried this butterfly wings style or am I the only one who hadn't tried this yet?
Misa BACKbone
KBShimmer Teal Another Tail 2 coats
Colors by Llarowe (gradient)
Oumaxi acrylic paints (black and white)
HK Girl Glisten & Glow
Two years ago I went for a more traditional animal print with this leopard print manicure:
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Se olisi siis haasteen 13. päivä ja vuorossa eläinprintti. Mielessä oli muutama muukin vaihtoehto, mutta päädyin lopulta tekemään nuo perhossiipikynnet Sannun kahden vuoden takaisen esimerkin siivittämänä. Näitä on ollut tarkoitus testata jo pitkän aikaa ja nyt sain viimein kokeiltua! Eihän noista viivoista millään tavalla suorat tai hyvät tullu, ei ehkä pitäisi nostella painoja ennen pikkutarkan kynsitaiteen tekemistä... :D Mutta toisaalta, eihän ne perhostenkaan viivat mitään viivottimella vedettyjä kai ole, eli kaipa nämä nyt ainakin jollain tavalla perhosen siipiä muistuttavat? Tosin tuo toinen puolisko luuli näitä alkuun akvedukteiksi (ennen kun olin kerinnyt nuo valkoiset pilkut lisätä). :DDD Ei kyllä ehkä ensimmäiseksi tulis mieleen maalata akvedukteja kynsille, mutta mikä minä oon sanomaan...
Kynsissä on ensin liukuvärjäys KBShimmerin Teal Another Taililla ja Colors by Llarowen Behead the Drama Queenilla. Mustat ja valkeat on maalattu akryylimaaleilla. Näistä tuli ihan hauskat ja ainakin vähän erilaiset, kuin viime kerralla! :)
It's day three of the challenge and I have one real copycat mani to show you guys. This almost a bit embarrassing as the whole idea of this mani and the colors and even two of the polishes that I used are all taken directly from this mani by the awesome french mani queen Sannu. So yeah, I didn't really use any of my own imagination for these nails... But for my defence, after seeing those nails that Sannu did on May, every time I've thought about what kind of yellow nails I could do for this challenge, the only thing that came to mind was that yellow french mani. So I finally thought that I just have to do my own copy of those nails to get them out of my system! (Thanks a lot Sannu for making such unforgettable manicure...)
Of course the thing is that you really shouldn't copy from people who do things better than your self or yours will always look inferior. So I probably shouldn't have copied this mani from Sannu as she does those really amazing french manis constantly and I've done maybe five french manis in my whole life... But like I said, I couldn't come up with anything else and I don't particularly enjoy yellow polish anyways, so I just had to do something. So without further blabber, here are my yellow nails.
Yep, like I said, these are not as good and clean as the original ones, but the design was so pretty that these still turned out really great (or at least I think so..). Somehow the dotting tool wasn't being my friend and I messed up those black dots, but at least from the distance this look quite nice. And if you consider the fact that I've used yellow nail polish here that I really do not like, these turned out really great!
If you are wondering what those weird yellow dots are on my ring finger nail, I managed to accidentally mess yellow polish there and so I needed something to cover it up... Not the greatest idea, but it did it's job.
I used Essence Nude Glam Cotton Candy as my base color for this mani and I have to say that I was really pleasantly surprised by it! The color is really great and suits me, and the formula was awesome! I have two coats here and it went on really effortlessly and evened out so nicely. The yellow is also Essence polish called Wanna Be Your Sunshine. It's pretty much the only yellow I own and I got it just because I thought I could need one yellow polish in my stash. The black is Essie Licorice and the black glitter is, of course, L'Oreal Confettis.
Misa BACKbone
Essence Cotton Candy 2 coats
Essence Wanna Be Your Sunshine 2 coats (tips)
L'Oreal Confettis 1 coat (tips)
Essie Licorice (black dots)
Sally Hansen Insta-Dri
My yellow mani two years ago looked like this:
I used China Glaze Trendsetter and Nubar 2010 for the mani and it was the case of not knowing if I should post it as yellow or green and compared to the mani I'm showing you today, I'd say this looks more green than yellow... But it was probably just my clever way of not having to do strickly yellow nails two years ago... You can check the whole post here.
I've done couple different Marimekko Unikko inspired nail before (you can see them here and here), but for a while I've thought that the pattern would be fun to do with textured polishes. This time I wanted to do only an accent nail with the Unikko pattern and use a textured polish as the rest of the mani.
So I chose couple of Zoya PixieDusts polishes to use in this mani. I did all but my ring finger with Zoya Miranda* and for the accent nail I used OPI Skull & Glossbones as my base color, then I did the Unikko flowers with Zoya Miranda, China Glaze White Out and Zoya Liberty*.
Miranda is really a gorgeous textured polish! The color is so pretty and it's unique at least compared to the other textured polishes that I have. I used three coats of Miranda for this mani, though it was pretty good with just two. I did the third one for just in case. I have to tell you that I'm a bit afraid to use Liberty for a whole mani as I've read that it stains nails really badly, but I guess I just have to try it to find out. At least the color is gorgeous too and I think Miranda and Liberty are a nice pair.
Nail Tek Foundation II
Zoya Miranda 3 coats
accent nail:
Nail Tek Foundation II
OPI Skull & Glossbones 3 coats
Sally Hansen Insta Dri
Zoya Miranda, China Glaze White Out and Zoya Liberty
*Zoya Miranda and Liberty were sent for me to review, for more information see my disclosure polic
I got four Zoya summer PixieDusts for review from the Finnish Zoya importer and they all looked so good that I couldn't decide which one to try out first. I certainly wanted to try out the light purple PixieDust called Stevie, but I decided to use Liberty and Miranda too (and also Zoya Julie). Here's what I came up with:
I used two coats of Zoya Stevie for my index and pinky fingers (and also thumb), I have no top coat over Stevie (of course), but I did use base coat. Then I did my middle and ring fingers with Zoya Julie, topped it of with base coat and waited it to be completely dry. After that I did the dots using dotting tool and the three PixieDust polishes Stevie, Liberty and Miranda. I didn't apply any topcoat over the dots as I wanted them to have the texture effect.
I've been waiting for someone to make a textured polish with the color of Stevie, so I'm sooo glad that Zoya did it! It's totally my kind of color and I love it! Also Miranda and Liberty looked really nice, I can't wait to try them out properly. However, I've heard that Liberty stains really badly, so I have to try to remember to do at least two coats of base coat under it.
I think these three colors went really well together and I liked the finished look very much. Also it was quite fun to have those textured dots over a regular smooth polish. I think I need to use these and other textured polishes more with regular ones.
Mereneid Base Coat - Ridgefiller Rose**
Zoya Stevie* 2 coats (index and pinky)
Zoya Julie* 2 coats with one coat of Sally Hansen Insta Dri (middle and ring)
Zoya Stevie, Liberty* and Miranda* (dots)
*Zoya Stevie, Julie, Liberty and Miranda were sent for me to review, for more information see my disclosure policy. **I got Mereneid Base Coat from the goodie bag from our meeting.
Yesterday I posted my Spring Roses manicure and I said I could do a little tutorial of the mani if you wanted, so here it comes. So here's how the finishes mani looked like:
And here's what you'll need for this:
- Base coat (mine is Mereneid Base Coat-Ridgefiller Rose that I got from the goodie bag from our meeting)
- Base color for your desing (I used OPI Mermaid's Tears)
- Top coat (mine is Sally Hansen Insta-Dri)
- Red, white and green acrylic paints (I've bought mine from ebay and they are from a brand called Oumaxi)
- Three different sizes of dotting tools OR something similar like toothpicks, pins or so (my dotting tools are some cheep ones from ebay)
- Nail art brush (mine is also some cheep one from ebay, it isn't probably the best one for this, so feel free to use any kind of brush you feel works best)
Here's a close-up of those dotting tools that I used. So I used a big one, medium one and that really thin one.
Step 1:
Paint your nails with the base coat.
Step 2:
Apply 2-3 coats of your base color until it's smooth and opaque. Let it dry (you can use a quick drying top coat here)
Step 3:
Take your red and white acrylic paint and do some dots (or blobs) of paint like in the picture. You need to have enough paint so you can easily swirl it around. I used the bigger dotting tool for the white and the bit smaller one for the red, because it helps to have a little bit more white paint than the red, because otherwise the red easily starts to dominate the game here..
Step 4:
Swirl the paint around with circular motion with the smallest dotting tool (or toothpick) starting in the middle and working your way from there.
So then you end up with a rose looking somewhat like this:
It doesn't really matter if it's not perfect, because they all are going to be somewhat different and in the end when you have several of these on your nails, they are going to look just fine.
Step 5:
Repeat the Step 4 to get as many roses to your nails as you want.
Step 6:
Take your nail art brush and white and green acrylic paint and do some leaves.
I used just a little bit of white on the other side of the brush, something like this:
You can place the leaves as you want and do as many as you want, I did two per rose here:
Step 7:
Allow your desing to dry completely and after that apply a top coat. If you apply the top coat too soon, you might smudge the desing, so be careful.
I hope you liked the tutorial and that this was helpful! Like I said in my post of these nails, I used this Youtube tutorial as an inspiration for these nails, so the design isn't really my own, but I did some this a bit differently, so I still wanted to do a tutorial for you guys. Feel free to ask anything if something is unclear to you.
As you can see, this look is really easy to do, so if you aren't that experienced in nail art (like me), you can still easily do this!
So yesterday I posted a list of my favourite polishes of 2012 and today it's time for my top ten of manicures this year. Again, these are in no particular order and I added the links to the original posts, if you want to take a closer look.
I know that there's nothing special with this last mani, it's just plain polish. But I wanted to add Oui to some list as I only got to wore it this year, but I came out 2011, so I didn't want to put it on the polish list. So I tought it deserved a place here, as it is really awesome polish!
So that was my top ten manicures of 2012. Which one was your favourite?
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