Textured Nail Art #1

I'm back!

Well, sort of.  We'll see how long it lasts...  I've got my old laptop and it struggles with most things.  But fair dos to it, it's 7 years old and it's working far better than my year and a half old laptop at the moment...

So anyhoo, I'm making my return with a post about textured nail art.  When textured polishes were first released, there was a flurry of excitement, but also lots of people asking 'but how can they be used in nail art??'.  I was going to put together this post way back when, when it would have beena little more relevant, but I was contacted by a company and asked to review some of their textured products, so I thought I'd hold off and wait for those to arrive.  Unfortunately, after I replied saying I'd love to do the review, and that it fitted perfectly with a series of posts I was planning, I never heard from them again!  Oh well...  so that's my excuse for why this is so late :p

I shall begin by saying this: I hate textured nail polish.  I hated all the swatches I saw, but I was overcome with excitement one day in Superdrug (you know how it is) and ended up buying two of the Barry M ones.  I hated them even more on the nail.  My fiance thought they looked cool, but he's a man so what does he know?

Anyhoo, here are a couple of suggestions for nail art with your textured polishes!

Half Moons

A classic manicure, why not give it a textured twist?

I normally just freehand on my half moons, but for this I used the hole reinforcer technique, as I didn't know how painting over the texture would go!  This is why my half moons are so big...need more practice!

I used Barry M Gold Foil with Barry M Kingsland Road over the top.

Stripes

Sit down and have a good old session with your striping tape.  Adding a textured polish in as one of your stripe colours adds a little extra interest to the manicure.

Here I used MUA All Nude for my base, and Barry M Peach Melba, Gold Foil and Ridley Road.

A little tip: I think you'd be better off doing all your normal polish stripes first, and then topcoating over that, and doing your textured stripe of top of that.  Otherwise it ends up quite bumpy all over like mine!

I hope this has given you some inspiration for other things you can do with your textured polishes!  I have two more designs that I'll be showing you tomorrow :)

It's also time to catch up with all the lovely British Bloggers!