Posts tagged: our nails
Easy peasy snakeprint nails!
Firstly, I know that these photos are crummy. I broke my own camera last week, and my iPhone is busy updating, so I had to use my parents bargain basement camera. Fun times.
Due to certain circumstances, I wasn’t able to post a tutorial last week, and since winter is creeping in, I thought better of the one I had planned. Winter, to me, is all about decadence. Fur coats, cashmere, thick hot chocolate. And animal print, I’m all about the animal print! Everyone and their mother knows how to do leopard print nails, so today I’m sharing a quick tutorial on snakeskin print nails.
I started by applying a base coat and then a base colour. Here, I used Nails Inc. Picadilly Circus, which I got free in Glamour Magazine today and wanted to try out for size. While I admit, you don’t find many pink snakes, it matches my personality better.
After that, I got my trusty Models Own black nail art pen (though a toothpick or eyeliner brush dipped in your chosen polish will do just as well), and created tiny circles all over my nail. Don’t worry about them not being all the same size, snakes don’t have a uniform scale pattern. As you can see in the photo, I found it easier to this step in rows, going from the base to the tip of my nails.
You can’t see this step in the pictures due to my not-so-great photography skills, but I filled in a thick stripe of the pink dots with pink glitter. Personally, I think it looks better, and more snake-like. But feel free to omit this step!
The next time I’m doing this nail art design, I feel like I should make the black circles slightly bigger. What do you think?
Collette
I was going to do a tutorial, but when I took off my polish today my poor nails had turned a lovely shade of yellow and had gone all dry and brittle - time to give them a bit of a rest. here’s a tutorial I did earlier for RTE’s Two Tube website.
The pictures should be fairly self-explanatory but you can check out the instructions on the Two Tube website.
Sarah
Heartbeat nails - please excuse the uneven nails lengths and awful cuticles, I spent most of my week at work cleaning, and tearing open boxes with my bare hands. Job gets done quicker, but my poor little nails are the sorry victims. Collette
Two tone pink and red nails. Irrelevant point - a manicurist once told me that I have ‘abnormally tiny nails’. She obviously left out that I have wrinkly Macbeth-witch type hands to match.
Polish used - Models Own in Red Alert and Bubblegum
Sarah
I was on hold with Meteor’s Customer Care service long enough to do a neon french mani and READ AN ENTIRE BOOK! Cop on, mobile/cell phone customer service people.
Polish used: Model’s Own Aciiied, Nail Star art pen in neon pink and Rimmel Pro Matte Finish
Just a note on the Model’s Own Aciiied - this is devilishly hard to photograph properly. In natural light it’s a green tinged yellow. With flash it’s *SHA-TING* a proper, bright yellow. It chips like there’s no tomorrow as well - something I’ve often found with Model’s Own polish. A shame, because they have so many lovely shades.
Sarah
I’m here to share the first of many Tutorial Tuesdays. Today I’ve gone for something simple, yet striking - floral nails. There are so many different tutorials for floral nails, but I find these the easiest.
- Prep your nails with a base polish of your choice. Then, paint your nails white. While completely optional, I find that it makes pastel colours pop more than just painting them straight on your nails.
- Choose your base colours. Here, I chose two colours, a mint green and pastel pink.
- Here comes the flowers. I put two dots of colour on my nails. Here, I used red and the pink from my index and ring fingernails. Then, I swirled the two colours using a toothpick to create a marbled effect. I took a green polish and created leaves beside the flowers.
- Usually for this step, I’d use a pink nail art pen, but because I have a shoddy camera, I used white to make it easier to understand. Taking a nail art pen, or toothpick dipped in nail polish, draw petals on the flower. I find it easiest to make comma shaped petals, starting from the inside and working my way out to the outside of the flower. I also used a dark green nail art pen to make the leaves pop more.
- For the contrasting nails, I just painted candy stripes using a thin brush dipped in white paint. Clean up any mess with a cotton bud dipped in nail polish remover.
Nail polish used:
Green: Models Own in Lime Green
White: O.P.I. Nail Lacquer in Alpine Snow
Red: 17 High Gloss in Risky Red
Mint: e.l.f. in Mint Cream
Pink: 17 Fast Finish in Pink Lemonade
Top Coat: Catrice High Shine
Nail art pens: Models Own white and Nail Star green.
Collette
Hot pink and teal leopard print nails (taken with Instagram) Collette
Peacock feather nails, hard to do, even harder to photograph. While time consuming, they did get the most reactions from people, and the colours work really well together.
Collette
These are my nails. Just a note - cocktails do not make your hand any steadier. Enough said.
Sarah
My nails and a Hard Lemonade.
