Polish Party-Spring/31WNAC-Yellow

Hello lovelies! I'm feeling a bit like a zombie today, my head just won't wake up. And I had planned to be so productive and everything =(

Anyway, today I have a double challenge mani, woo! I've got the March Polish Party prompt of Spring along with my own 31Week Nail Art Challenge one of yellow so I went for some lovely springy daffodils.

Polishes used: Sinful Colors-Mint Apple, Barry M-Lemon Icecream, Matt White, Revlon-Electric, Sally Hansen-Man-go Team! and Rimmel-Tangy Tangerine. My boyfriend did my off hand for these again, he's really getting into playing with dotting tools and stuff, it's quite fun!

I don't really know what else to say about these (zombie brain, haha!) but they did cheer me up a lot because they are so bright and cheerful.

Hope you're having a good Sunday!

~Nail Art Novice~

Twinsie Nails-Peacock Print

Hello lovelies! Today I've got another 'twin nails' post, where you and another person create the same/similar manis. I'm in a FB group for this (which you can join here) and for this months theme I was paired with the lovely Jessica from Be Happy, Buy Polish. The theme this month was 'animal print' and we got randomly given Peacock print. Jessica had loads of ideas and inspiration for this (which is great cos I had none!), but this is what we eventually took for our inspiration:

Source: Cake Wrecks

After messages flying back and forth we eventually decided to concentrate on the green/blue circles and the crest on the top to make a sort of de-constructed peacock print. We also added a peacock feather as an accent on the thumb, using this fab tutorial by the Nail Nerd.
Polishes I used: Barry M-Blue Grape, Guava, Key Lime, Rimmel-Serene, M&S-Blue

My dots are a little all over the place but I kinda like them anyway, they're funky!
Here's a collage of our nails together, and make sure you go and check out Jessica's post over here too!

This was really fun to do actually, I love seeing how two people can recreate the same idea slightly differently. I'll definitely be joining in in future!

~Nail Art Novice~

March TPT The Fourth

Hello lovelies! Happy Tuesday-hope the weather near you is nicer than here, it's very grey today!
Today brings the final instalment of the March Tri-Polish Tuesdays challenge, the colours for which have been green, blue and purple (so I have been very much in my element!). Today's mani is bright and a bit mad to look at-I love it!

Polishes used: Sally Hansen-Grass Slipper, Sally Hansen-Brisk Blue and Sinful Colors-Amethyst 

I decided to do a double tape mani with them, because I really love the way the colours play together and thought they'd look awesome all peeking out from under each other-turns out I was right!

What can I say? I love a double tape mani. They do take ages to do but they way they come out is so unique and fun that I will always forgive them! I have enjoyed doing these Tri-Polish manis, but I am yet to decide if I am taking part in next month's as the dreaded PINK is one of the colours haha. We shall see!

As ever, don't forget to check out what the other talented ladies have done in the inlinkz below!

~Nail Art Novice~

31WNAC 2-Orange

Hello lovelies, happy Friday!

I've got a brightly coloured mani for you today for Orange week and although it's a little nerdy I kinda love it! The first thing I thought of when I considered 'orange things' was the warning stickers you get in labs and on chemicals and stuff  and I just really wanted to recreate them on my nails. I used Barry M-Mango and on my accents added a touch of sparkle with Tara's Talons-Naughty or Nice from my advent calendar. I added the details with my black Barry M nail art pen.

L-R Irritant, Radioactive, General Warning 

L-R Flammable, Biohazard, Electrical Hazard

Some of these are more traditonally seen on yellow signs but shush, I'm stretching the rules a little here =p. The nerdy scientist in me loves them, and the glitter is also really pretty!

Here's the prompts if you were wondering what to look forward to:

Hoping you all have wonderful weekends!

~Nail Art Novice~

March TPT The Third

Hello lovelies! I'm back again today with another blue, green and purple Tri-Polish Tuesday, but this one is a little bit special! At the start of the month I was lucky enough to win one of the prize sets in AJ from Nail Lacquer UK's giveaway and it was a set of four glittery duochrome polishes from her indie brand. This was kinda bittersweet for me as these are my first Nail Lacquer UK polishes (woo!) but sadly AJ closed her shop up earlier this year, so they are also my last. They're pretty gorgeous though, and as there was a purple, blue and green one I wanted to use them for this challenge!

They were all un-named apart from the purple which was called Galaxy so I decided to give them appropriately space-y names to go with it! L-R above is Universe, Planet, Galaxy, Solar System and I used two coats of all but the last one for this mani over black.

Aren't they pretty? Such sumptuous colours, they remind me of the iridescent scales on scarab beetles or something, and I mean that in an entirely complimentary way! They're lovely, and went on really easily too, I had no issues with the application. The glitters add another dimension of gorgeousness too!

I managed to get a picture of the colour shift too in the glorious sunshine we had the other day-albeit on my phone. The blue goes to an indigo/purple, the purple goes to green and the green goes red!

All kinds of beautiful, don't cha think?

~Nail Art Novice~

31WNAC 1-Red

Meant to get these up few days ago-oops! This was an idea that came about because I was stuck for inspiration and was looking through the nails I have saved in my 'inspiration' folder and found these gorgeous hippo ones by The Little Canvas. I wanted to recreate them but didn't want to use the same colours and was sat deliberating in front of my Helmer when my boyfriend suggested Hungry Hungry Hippos! He's handy to keep around, that one =p

So here's my red mani, using: Barry M-Passionfruit, Lemon Icecream, Matt White, Rimmel-Rose Libertine, Pear Drop, Tangy Tangerine, W7-Black. This is one of the rarer occasions where I only show you one of my hands, cos I'm afraid to say my off hand hippos looked more like demented rabbits! Haha!

So there's the four hippos themselves and the spots on my thumb are to represent the balls which they just go mad for. This was a very silly mani but I rather enjoyed it!

Have a good weekend

~Nail Art Novice~

31 Week Nail Art Challenge

With the end of the Mish Mash challenge, I can't help but feel at a bit of a loss, nail art wise. I'm struggling to find inspiration for what I want to do and often just end up with bare nails as a result. To try and get my mojo back a little, I'm doing the 31 Day Nail Art Challenge, only I'm doing it one prompt a week instead. I have no idea where this originated from, I've seen it on that many blogs-nearly every nail blogger has done it at some point, so you might be familiar with it!

These are the list of prompts that I will be following-one a week for the next 31 weeks which should take me to October although there will be a large gap in the middle when I am travelling so I probably won't finish til November/December time. I'm quite excited, I've been collecting ideas for this for a while and it's hopefully going to be pretty fun!

See you soon with number 1!

~Nail Art Novice~

March Tri Polish Tuesday The Second

Here we are again with another Tri-Polish mani. This month's colours are Blue, Green and Purple and for this mani I have used Barry M-Greenberry, Rimmel-Marshmallow Heaven and Aqua Cool which are a really fun trio, I reckon. I also added a coat of my Iconic Effect-Extreme Holo Topcoat to my base colours before I added the nail art on top and they all look pretty awesome as holos XD
I decided to do dot-flowers and my boyfriend asked if he could do my off-hand because he likes playing around with dotting tools-who am I to pass up an opportunity like that? Haha!

These really didn't wear very well, I only had them on for about a day before they started chipping, which is why they look a little worse for wear in the photos I'm afraid. Still pretty though! First photo is my hand and the second is the one my boyfriend did-although I did the base coats. Not bad for a newbie, are they?

I love these, they're happy nails-bright and sparkly and fun, it's just a shame about the chips already-boo!

Don't forget to check out the other tri polish manis in the inlinkz!

~Nail Art Novice~

Tara's Talons Swatches-Swim With Dolphins and Chocolate Orange

~PIC HEAVY POST~

~Items in this post were sent to me for my honest review~

Regular readers of this blog may have heard of Tara's Talons before-it's the longest running UK Indie Polish brand and often featured on my blog because I love her polishes. A few weeks ago, Tara said she was looking for some swatchers for March so I filled in her blogger application form even though I didn't think I had a chance. To my surprise and delight, she emailed me to ask me to help out this month and I almost fell out of my chair! I started squeeing out loud so hard my boyfriend asked me what was wrong, haha!

So today I've got two gorgeous Tara's Talons polishes for you, yaaay! 

With flash

First up is the very lovely 'Swim With Dolphins' which is a pale blue with a silver shimmer running through it. This is three coats, I could have used two really, but I thought I could still see a hint of nail line through it so I stuck another on just to make sure. The polish went on really nicely-there was a small amount of lifting if you went over the same patch more than once but nothing that caused a problem, and it all evened out beautifully by the second coat. It did dry with some brush strokes in but I think that's more because of the shimmery/pearly finish than a problem with the polish. A lick of topcoat and you can't even notice them. 

With flash

Normal indoor lighting

I really like this one! It's such a nice colour-I can't help but think of it as the natural brother of 'Dasher' from my advent calendar-he's green with a gold shimmer running through and SWD is a blue with silver, I think they'd make a lovely pair! 

The other polish I was sent was called Chocolate Orange and there is so much going on in it! At first glance I just thought it was yellow glitters in a browny base but no! There's actually matte yellow, shiny silver and translucent orange hexes, bright orange stars, bronze mini hexes and goldy-bronze mini squares AND brown microglitter-it's crammed full of glitters! I wanted to show this one off to its full potential, so I've swatched it over several colours -and it's so pretty!

With flash

With flash

This is one coat over Swim With Dolphins. It does dry with a slightly gritty texture (because of all those glitters!) but again this is fixed with a layer of topcoat. I didn't have to fish for any of the glitters, even the stars, and there was a great payoff of glitter per brush load. I did use the dabble technique to move some of the hexes around a bit, because they tended to want to clump, but other than that this was one easy coat. I decided to try it over a complimentary colour and also some completely contrasting colours to see how it would look!

With flash

 One coat over Maybelline-Winner Takes It All. My ring finger is 4 coats of Chocolate Orange on its own, to show that if you wanted to you could definitely wear this polish without any undies, as the coverage is fairly dense. Personally, I prefer it as a topper though, I love seeing all the different glitters spread out! This combo is so Autumnal, it's lovely.

One coat over Rimmel-Marshmallow Heaven and Barry M-Greenberry (ring finger as before). These were totally random colour choices-I was just trying to find some colours that would contrast really well. I actually love the mix-I can't help but feel that it's a really Spring-y combo over Greenberry-so this really is a glitter for all seasons!

Overall, I can't recommend Tara's Talons polishes enough-there's so many different ones out there that there's definitely something for everyone. Most of her polishes are limited editions or one off though, so if you see something you like, be sure to snap it up quickly! Plus Tara is lovely, and always goes out of her way to help out her customers. You can find Tara's Talons polishes on her Etsy shop here or through her website here. She's also just expanded to form 'The Tara Emporium' and is now selling all sorts of beauty goodies/jewellery/home items too, as well as lots of other exciting things so make sure to go to her website and check all of that awesomeness out! 

That's all from me today, big thank you to Tara!

~Nail Art Novice~

March Tri Polish Tuesday The First

Hey lovelies! Happy Pancake Day! (Nom!)

Today I'm joining in with the Tri Polish challenge, although it's undergone a little revolution since last year. Basically the rules are now that there is a set of given colours for each month (details of which can be found here) and you do four manis with polishes matching those colour prompts BUT you no longer have to use the same polishes throughout. You still have free use of black/white/silver/gold and glitter toppers. This month's colours are green, blue and purple-all my faves and the polishes I have the most of, so I had to join in.

For today's mani, these are the (rather gorgeous) polishes I've used-all from the Shine On Collection by Nails Inc
L-R: Lyall Street, Elm Park Road, Raphael Street

Aren't they lovely? They're so much more sparkly in real life too! I also used Revlon-Silver Screen to break up the colours a bit. I've done a 'mermaid scale' mani on my accents and then stamped waves from the MoYou London-Sailor 3 plate on the rest.

Yeah I don't know what happened to my index finger either...

I love love love these! They're so shiny and sparky! I really really like the Shine On collection, I think they're all pretty beautiful and together like this they look fab too! The mermaid scales took ages but I like the random look of them.

Don't forget to check out the other gorgeous tri-polish manis in the inlinkz and enjoy all your scrummy pancakes!!

~Nail Art Novice~

Polish Party-Chevrons

Hello lovelies!
One of the new groups I am taking part in challenges with is called Polish Party and they choose a theme each month and post nail art on that theme in the last week. This month's theme is chevrons.

I started with a base of Barry M-Matt White, and then added the chevron guide stickers (from this set, although I cut them in half). I painted the very gorgeous Chubby Owl Polish-Midnight Owls on one half of the sticker and Barry M-Majesty on the other, then removed the sticker.

I really like the way this has turned out, I love the colours together, especially Midnight Owls which is just all kinds of beautiful! I don't do chevron nail art very often but I think I should cos it's really effective!

Check out what the other Polish Party lovelies have done for their chevron posts too, and I'll  be back soon =)

~Nail Art Novice~

Mish Mash Challenge Round-Up

PIC HEAVY POST

I recently realised that I'd let the end of the Mish Mash challenge pass me by, it got lost somewhere in my move and recent events. I'm kinda sad to see this one go cos it was this lovely group of ladies that kinda helped me find my footing in the nail art world, and I will miss being connected with them every week. Here's a round up of all the mish mash manis I did:

Week 1-Purple

Week 2-Taping

Week 3-Metallic

Week 4-New Nail Art Technique (1)

Week 4-New Nail Art Technique (2)

Week 5-Music

Week 6-Hot

Week 8-Cold

Week 9-Blue

Week 10-Triangles

Week 11-Book

Week 12-Flowers

Week 13-Rainbow

Week 14-Pink

Week 15-Holographic

Week 16-Faux Stone (ah ha ha, I still think this is hilarious =p)

Week 17-Grey

Week 18-Card/Board Game

Week 20-Nail Stamping

Week 24-Inspired By A Decade

Week 25-Two Colours You Never Normally Pair Up

Week 26-Favourite Nail Art Technique(s)

Week 27-Green

So that's the Mish Mash challenge over and out! It was so much fun, thanks to all the ladies that were involved!

But fear not, there's lots of other challenges I plan on taking part in now this one is over. There's the Tri-Polish Tuesdays challenge (find out more here), Fingerfood's Nail Art Buffet (here) and the Twin Blog Posts (here) plus plenty more I'm sure! I'm also going to try to start what I've been planning for a while and do the 31 Day Challenge but doing one mani a week or something. Basically, there will still be lots going on here, so stick around =)

~Nail Art Novice~