Polished Art: green

Tuesday, 30 December 2014

Honeymoon Nails: Honu

Hello all :) I hope you've all had a lovely Christmas and have some exciting plans for tomorrow night! I just thought I'd squeeze in a quick post before the new year.

As I've mentioned before (once or twice..), in August this year, my husband and I went to Hawaii on our honeymoon. I've previously shown you some dragonfly nails inspired by Hawaii, which you can see here, and today I have some more Hawaii-inspired nails to show you.

Our hotel had a tidal lagoon that was FULL of turtles! It was totally amazing. We went out snorkeling everyday (me with my life jacket on, since I float like a brick) and there were so many lovely turtles around. They'd also come up on to the beach every afternoon to soak up some sun before sunset. Turtles have well and truly established themselves in my top 5 animals, which of course is where every animal aspires to be...

So, first a real turtle:

And now my attempt:

honeymoon-nail-art-honu-sea-turtle-sponged

I sponged on some turtley colours - this is super simple and I love the effect, but if you're not sure how to do it you can take a look at my tutorial here - and then added my little gold honu. Looks just like the real thing, no..?

What do you think? Do you think I managed to capture enough turtliness with the sponged background, or would you have gone for something different?

PS. Happy new year!

Wednesday, 29 August 2012

31 Day Challenge - Day 4: Green

A second post today! Might as well get a load in before I start my new job, the frequency is seriously going to decrease as of Monday (although after a month I'm going to be in uni for a couple of months, so obviously then painting my nails will take priority over essays).

Today is day 4 of the 31 day challenge being organised by Kimber at Kimber's Lacquer Korner. We're working our way through the rainbow, and today we're on green.

I'm finding it quite difficult to get inspiration just from a colour, I think I need a bit more guidance than that...Coming up with ideas is always the hardest part of a manicure for me (so keep the suggestions coming on Facebook, in comments or by emailing me). So, today's manicure is in no way inspired by the colour green, other than being green, but I thought I'd seize the opportunity to try out the cling film technique.

I used China Glaze Exotic Encounters and Zoya Meg. I really like the effect this technique gives, and it's so quick and easy - perfect if you're in a rush but want something more interesting than just plain nails (which you should, all the time...). From what I've read on other blogs, you can do this via two methods. You can either paint the second colour on and then dab it off with some cling film while it's still wet, or you can use the cling film to sponge the second colour on to the nail. I used the former (I always get former and latter mixed up, but I think I mean former...). I was going to try both techniques, one on each hand, to see if they produced different results. But I didn't. So...yeah, no idea which technique is better.

Anyhoo, next up in the challenge is blue nails on Saturday. I have a manicure using China Glaze Man Hunt...such a pretty blue.