Monday 26 August 2013

Guest Post: Cambridge Nails

Aloha!

Speaking of which...my fiance suggested Hawaii for our honeymoon.  Has anyone been there and can recommend it??

Sorry, I'm far too easily distracted by wedding talk!

Today's guest post comes from Emma at Cambridge Nails.  This is a fairly new blog, but my word has Emma posted some stunning manicures in the few months she's been up and running!  I love that her manicures are all so bright.  Check out this Samba Nail Art to see what I'm talking about!

Emma has very sweetly taken inspiration from my Nail Art In A Hurry series for her guest post.

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Hi, I'm Emma from Cambridge Nails and I'm very excited to be writing a guest post for Samantha of Polished Art whose blog I really admire. I thought I'd do another post along the lines of Samantha's nail art in a hurry series and show you a couple of things you can do very quickly with dots. The first one I'm going to show you is a very simple design using two contrasting polishes and a single dotting tool.


1) Paint your nails with your base colour, you can use the same colour on all of your nails or mix things up a bit using different colours. The ones above are Lilypad Lacquer Bluebell and Nature Calling, you can immediately move onto the next step without these needing to be dry.

2) Put a blob of your contrasting polish onto a piece of paper and use the bigger end of your dotting tool to make a dot in the middle of your nail at the cuticle end (get enough polish on your tool that you can make the dot without touching your nail with the actual tool, this will make more regular dots) then flip the tool over and use the smaller end to make a second dot directly above the first. If the dots start to become irregular wipe off the end of your dotting tool on a tissue (not cotton wool because it will get tangled round the tool!)

3) Top coat and you're done. 

Variations
1) Do some of your nails with the dots starting from the free edge as in the above photo
2) Use a series of different sizes of dotting tool to make a line of tapering dots all the way up your nail.

But I don't own a dotting tool!
Not a problem, you probably have a pencil, the non writing end of a biro, a hair grip (bobby pin for you Americans), a toothpick, or a steady enough hand just to use the polish brush (if you have wide/long enough nail beds to handle large dots). And if you've read this and now think it would be really cool to own a dotting tool set they're floating around for sale on eBay and amazon and some high street sellers are branching out to nail art sets which include them (I have seen one in H&M).
Which are the best polishes to use?
Polishes which are very opaque will make the strongest dots, however as a dot is usually a fairly large glob of polish almost any polish will work (see the yellow over black below). For an interesting effect use a glitter in a clear base or a base the same colour as the polish to produce a dot which does not have an exact edge. 

You can also make a really quick look by doing a single diagonal line of dots on each nail - I used a toothpick to make the dots in this design.


If you have a little longer you can use a rainbow of polishes over a neutral base to give a very design. I did this on all my nails but you could just do it on one or two for a striking accent nail.


Even this design only took me about 10 minutes to complete all of the dots so it really isn't that time consuming.

If you've enjoyed this post head over to camnails.blogspot.co.uk to see some more of my work and thank you Samantha for having me as a guest poster :)

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I am slightly in love with that rainbow dotticure...  I always think I don't have the patience for so many dots (and to be fair actually, I probably don't...can't stuff chocolate in my mouth when my nails are wet) but I may have to give something like this a go!  And I love the simplicity of that two dot manicure - would look really sophisticated :)

Thank you again Emma!

If you like what you see, here are all the ways you can see more of Emma's work:

Twitter (@cambridge_nails)

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