Rara's Holiday Nails

The week before Jenni went to Oz I went to Turkey so obviously I had to do some bright holiday nails!I did contemplate doing turkeys but decided to stick to a bright and simple gradient mani.

I used the following polishes; Tara's Talons-Super Soaker, Nails Inc-Big Red Apple, Essie-Fear and Desire, Nails Inc-Belsize Park, Nails Inc-Uptown Glamour and Tara's Talons-Fairy. I also used the Vinyl Boutique palm tree decals.Totally love these decals they're so easy to use and look fantastic!

I thought the blue would act as the sky making its way down through the colours to the gold as the sand.

I am pretty pleased with how these turned out and I they sparkled in the sun really prettily!

Not long now til Jenni gets back!

~Rara~

Guest Post-Vicky Loves Nails

Hello everyone! My name is Vicky, I run a blog called Vicky Loves Nails and I am very happy to be
guest posting for Jenni today whilst she is off travelling in Australia. I am incredibly jealous, I want to
come too!

But since I can’t crash Jenni’s travels, I decided to use it as some inspiration for nail art (the next best
thing right?!). I spent a while trying to decide what to do for these, in the end I decided to go for
something incredibly stereotypical, but it is always the first thing I think of when I think of Australia...
Kangaroos!

I started with a gradient using Nicole by OPI – Hit The Lights and Essie – Fear or Desire. I freehanded
my kangaroo silhouette using W7 – Black. I decided to add the plant type thing on my thumb as I
thought the design needed something a little extra, for this I used W7 – Black and Sinful Colors –
Snow Me White.

I was pretty pleased with how this came out. I was unsure if I was going to be able to paint a
realistic kangaroo, but I think I did a pretty good job (well I can tell what it is at least lol). I hope you
all like it.

Thanks so much Jenni for letting me guest post on your blog, I hope you have an amazing time in
Australia!

Guest Post Week! Monkey Nail Art

Hi all! I'm Rachel from Monkey Nail Art and I'm chuffed to bits to be doing a guest post for Nail Art Novice. Sometimes it's nice to get out and about, you know? Jenni is a fabulous artist and looking through her designs I knew I'd have to do something extra special. Two things struck me about Jenni's blog - rainbow colours and striping tape. So I got out my brightest polishes and came up with this:

This is a reverse gradient of sorts - that is, I started with a plain base colour, applied my striping tape and then sponged the gradient over the top. I love how the gold really pops out!

My base gold colour is from Claire's Accessories (unnamed.) Following that I used:
Nails Inc Big Apple Red
Rimmel Tangerine Queen
Collection 2000 Sherbet Lemons
Barry M Emerald Green
Essie Sweet Talker
Essie Butler Please

It's all finished off with Seche Vite for that extra gorgeous glossy finish.

Thanks so much to Nail Art Novice for having me on your blog and inspiring me to create such bright, bold nails!

Guest Post Week! Penguins Left Green Polish

Hey Girls!

Yaaay! Guest post for one of my favourite bloggers <3 :) I'm loving that I am in a group with amazing nail bloggers! I always jump at the chance to be able to do a guest post!

Today's guest post is for Jenni over at Nail Art Novice! I absolutely love her blog, Her pictures are lovely and a pleasure to look at! Love how she doesn't give a toss about messy nails and that is inspiring!

Over at my blog, I'm on a recent crazy with a glitter topper by NYC called Lights, Camera, Glitter! I've been layering this beauty on everything!! I've layered it over a minty green HERE and over a greeny gradient HERE ...And while I'm writing this post I just realised I've layered the glitter over greens!! :D 

Here is the beautiful glitter layered over Essie's - Going Incognito...this time a dark green!! I've included a swatch of the green because I love how beautiful it is! Two layers of greeny goodness!!

With the Glitter topper!

Love it :D But i'm a bit biased! Lol, what do you guys think?!

Thank you Jenni for having me on your blog :D 

You can keep up with me through:

www.Penguinsleftgreenpolish.blogspot.com

Bloglovin' - PenguinsLeftGreenPolish 

Facebook - PenguinsLeftGreenPolish

12 Days Of Xmas Nail Art 11-Christmas Trees

Squeezing this post in before the end of Saturday so I can still claim to have posted on time, haha. I've been visiting my boyfriend today so haven't been able to post yet.
The penultimate Xmas challenge mani! Boo! I've had such fun doing these every day and sharing the challenge with some awesome ladies. For 'Christmas trees' I've known what I wanted to do ever since way back when in Metallic week of the Mish Mash challenge. I festived them up a bit but that's where the idea came from.
Polishes used: GOSH-Holographic Hero (not that you can really see the holo any more, many layers of topcoat killed it. It did look pretty awesome to begin with though!), Barry M-Cosmic Glow (magnetic), Maybelline-Winner Takes It All, London Girl Polish-#79, Rimmel-Red Carpet and Barry M-Teal. I added some gems that I won in a giveaway prize because hey, it's Christmas, and I fancied trying something different. Amazed how well they've stayed on actually!

These are fun! I did find the gems a bit weird at first because I wasn't used to having 3D things on my nails but I forgot about them fairly quickly. These make me feel VERY festive!

Rara
Polishes used: Base of Layla-Mermaid Spell, thumb xmas tree; nail art pen with Tara's Talons-12 Days over the top, index finger; Avon-Noir Emerald with nail art pen decorations, middle finger: Essie-Mojito Madness with Tara's Talons-Bauble over the top, ring finger; Avon-Garden Green mixed with Sinful Colors-Pistache with Andrea Fulerton silver nail pen for tinsel and little finger; as before. All trees have Avon-Express Mocha stumps and yellow nail pen stars.
I am very surprised how many greens I actually have as I don't really like green!! I like how all of my trees are different and my favourite two have to be the ones on my thumb and index fingers! 

Really sad that we only have one more mani left to do :'(

~Rara~

I'm also quite sad we've only got one left-it's been a really fun month trying to organise these around my life haha! Don't forget to check out the other ladies trees in the inlinkz. I'll be back on Monday with the FINAL mani, booo!

~Nail Art Novice~

12 Days Of Xmas Nail Art 10-Santa

~Pic Heavy Post~

So we're down to the final three manis of this challenge and I still can't really believe that it's gone by so quickly-I mean in a WEEK Christmas will have been and gone, what's that about?! In the spirit of all things Christmassy, here's some Santa nails-hope you've all been good this year ;)
I saw some awesome ones by Pause For Polish yesterday and decided to recreate them as accents, along with some Santa hats. For my Santas I used Rimmel-Red Carpet/Serene plus W7-Black and Maybelline-Winner Takes It All. On my hats I added Barry M-Lady to add a touch of sparkle and to make the fluff look fluffier, oh and the background is Revlon-Silver Screen. My other fingers have a base of Tara's Talons-Carollers from my Advent Calendar which is a lovely forest green with gold glitters. On top of that is two coats of the appropriately named Absolut Lacquer-Mrs Claus' Night Out for that perfect mix of Festive colours!

First (pre clean up!) pic is to show Carollers in all its glory.

I also grabbed one without flash to show off Mrs Claus to her full potential-she's packed full of silver and red micro glitter and larger silver pieces:

I really like these! They're super festive and really rather cool I reckon. My Mum liked them so much that she asked me to do some on her too (and that's a big deal because she never ever wears nail polish!), which I think is pretty cool =D

Rara
Polishes used: Barry M-Retro Red, Essie-Cascade Cool, Nails Inc-Uptown Glamour, Barry M-Matt White and Andrea Fulerton black and silver.
I love my Santas!!!!!! I'm not sure if you can tell but they are tiny boots on my little finger! I like how happy and cutey my Santas' faces are!!!

It's "Christmas Day" today so I'm meeting Novice and we're going to swap gifts so it actually feels like Christmas now!!

~Rara~

Haha, yeah, we're going to take our Santa nails and eat some scrummy food whilst exchanging presents today, yay! I love Christmas!
Here, if you need them, are the challenge prompts one last time-only two left to go now.

And check out the other Santa manis too!

~Nail Art Novice~

12 Days Of Xmas Nail Art 3-Food

I was intrigued to see this prompt get as many votes as it did when we were picking themes for the challenge-it wouldn't have been one I would have chosen myself but that's the beauty of getting people to vote I guess!
I had a plan in my mind for these, but unfortunately my MoYou festive plate hasn't shown up yet (Boo!) so I had to think of something else and the only things I could really think of were candy canes or Christmas pud! As I don't eat Xmas puds I decided to go for candy canes! Polishes used were Rimmel-Serene/Red Carpet and Tara's Talons-Dasher from my advent calendar which I just adore! Sadly (for you guys) this polish isn't available in her shop because all the calendar polishes are one offs (with the same names) so my 'Dasher' won't be the same as anyone else's, which makes me love it even more!

Anyway, pictures!

I have to say I'm not the biggest fan of this mani, I like the stripes but all the candy canes on my accents are different sizes and a bit wibbly and I just don't love them. However, to redeem myself, let me show you a picture of 'Dasher' before I stuck nail art on top of it-it's gooooorgeous!

Rara
Pigs in blankets!!!! My favourite Christmas food of all time. I could eat my body weight in these every year! I used Avon-Gray Flash for the base, Essie-Cascade Cool for the pigs and the blankets were done with pens from Paperchase. I outlined the pigs with Andrea Fulerton black. And because I didn't think they looked very Christmassy I added little santa hats with Barry M-Bright Red.

Oh my gosh I love these so much...not sure I want to take them off to do my next mani!!

~Rara~

Awwh! I love them too, so cute! I also love the fact (because I'm a big sciencey nerd) that the blanket on her little finger looks like a Christmas amoeba! That might just be me though haha. Don't forget to check out the other awesome 'food' manis in the inlinkz below and happy Thursday!

~Nail Art Novice~

Rara's Super Quick Summer Nails

Hello lovelies! Rara here again! I'm posting today because Novice is away visiting her friend and doesn't have any internet so you get me instead! I've got a couple of summery designs I did that were pretty quick and easy.

First up-Gradients and stars.
I wanted to try some gradients on my own this time [Novice-last time I did some for her-here]. Me and Novice went to the park in the sunshine and I took my polishes. I used Avon-Forget-Me-Not Blue, Plum Seduction and Make My Day with a Rimmel glittery top coat. 
It was quite difficult to start with as I couldn't get the colours to blend properly, and I'm not sure I managed to get it right on all of my nails. I decided I wanted the colours to alternate so I went from blue to red then red to blue. After that I added some nail stickers that are also from Avon. I was quite pleased with the results and got a few compliments from them too, which is always good!

Next up-a summery dotticure.

Polishes used were both Essie-Mojito Madness and Off The Shoulder. This was just a quick and simple mani-I needed to paint my nails but was just going to bed. I painted each layer in between reading chapters of my book. Super quick, very easy and quite effective!

That's all from me for today but I'm sure I'll see you again soon!

~Rara~

Cherry Pop

Guess who's back? It's Rara, YAY! (For those of you who don't know Rara is my best friend and occasional partner in blogging, and she broke her wrist about a month ago and so has been out of action for a while.) This is her first blog post in a couple of months and I'm really glad she's back! (If only so I get a break, haha-just kidding!)
Over to Rara then:

~

Having had pretty boring nails for three/four weeks while my hand was in a cast I've been craving beautiful nails again, if only to stop me looking at the scar all the way along my wrist =(  Luckily Novice has been on hand to do them for me!
I'm far enough along in my recovery now that I can straighten and bend my fingers and turn my wrist to enough of an angle to paint my own nails again-yaaaay! And a good thing about not being able to use my hand is how long and strong my nails have gotten. Although I cannot do the 'traditional' pose for the pictures (as I still can't bend my thumb) I have tried my best.
Because of the lovely weather I wanted something summery so I decided on cherries.

[Novice] I know it's not the traditionally done thing but I
LOVED the backdrop she was using against those cherries =)

I used Barry M-Matt White with a glittery top coat by Rimmel called Disco Gold, Barry M-Matt White and Essie-Mojito Madness and topped everything off with a Barry M Topcoat.

This was an easy and simple mani that I was even able to do on my right hand!
I really like this one, it's so bright and summery...it makes me and my stupid broken hand/wrist happy!!!

~Rara~

~

Aww, I love this super fun mani! I'm also really glad that Rara's almost back to full fitness too. I'm sure you'll be seeing her around here more often again now!

~Nail Art Novice~

Try Something Tuesdays: Colour Blocking

Hi lovelies!

I'm back from Brighton after a fantastic weekend away and have finally had chance to paint my nails again. After 4 days of plain black nails I wanted something colourful and so opted to try out colour blocking, inspired by this design by motelrocks.co.uk which was just something I randomly found whilst searching for ideas. I didn't want to stick to only 5 colours though, so I chose 10 and applied them randomly across all my nails for a ridiculously colourful effect =)

Here's my polishes:

L-R they are: No 7-Siren, Rimmel-Sunrise, Collection-Look At Me! (Apparently they're no longer Collection 2000, I'd not even noticed!), Essie-Mojito Madness, Barry M-Greenberry, Collection-Electric Dreams, Barry M-Navy, Barry M-Plum, Revlon-Hazy and Barry M-Gold Foil. I also used my black Barry M nail art pen for the lines.

Because I knew I wouldn't be able to get them very neat otherwise, I drew the lines on first, filled in the boxes with colour and then went over the lines again which took ages but I didn't have anything to do so it was fine. There's a couple of holes on my right hand but otherwise it worked quite well! Here's the result:

I think my favourite of all is my left index finger, I just really like the combination of colours. I love the look, it's so bright and cheerful, especially after a weekend of dreary plain black nails (I missed my nail art!). Colourful nails are so much more fun =)

In other news, I'm thinking of cutting down these Try Something Tuesday posts, I want to try more nail art and they limit what I can do really, especially if sometimes I just can't be bothered to do something complicated and want to go with something more simple/that I know I can do. I won't stop them completely because there's still things I haven't tried (gradients, marbling, etc etc) but I won't be doing them every week from now on, so I've got a bit more freedom to post!

Hope you all had wonderful weekends enjoying the beautiful weather!

~Nail Art Novice~

If you want to know more about what I got up to in Brighton, I've got a post on my other blog about it.

ABC Challenge: O is for Owls

Following Tuesday's total disasticure I am pleased to say that this mani is probably my favourite piece of nail art that I've ever done-I'm totally in love with it and don't want to take it off ever! Sorry if it sounds like I'm bragging but I'm just really proud of myself that I've done something that looks so good, I was so surprised how well it turned out!

So this week is 'O' in the ABC Challenge and I knew what I wanted to do straight away-something I saw a while ago and knew I would recreate. Before I even started my own blog I found these amazing owl nails by The Little Canvas and loved them. I finally got around to doing them myself!

Polishes used: Essie-Mojito Madness, Barry M-Lychee (finally I own this beauty!), Collection 2000-Look At Me! and Rimmel-Tangy Tangerine. Details were added with my new Barry M Nail Art Pen (I LOVE being able to spend my hard earned Boots points on awesome things!) which worked like a dream. 

Without further ado then (I took lots of pictures because I love them so much!):

Sadly this guy suffered a surprise zip attack shortly after he was
finished, hence the dint

This one really makes
me giggle!

So there we have it! I think next time I do these (there will be a next time!!!) I'll put a neutral base on over my nails first, just because the green makes my natural nail colour look a bit weird and purple (see my thumb on the first pic). I really love them though! They're making me really happy =)

Hope you like them as much as I do!

~Nail Art Novice~

Check out the other 'O' posts by these lovelies:

Try Something Tuesday-Splatter Mani

Hello lovelies, I'm back! I had a lovely time in Sheffield (so much so I didn't want to come home!) but my nails have suffered badly for it. Hoping to get back into the swing of blogging this week though, just with stubby nubbins!
So with no further ado, here's today's Try Something Tuesday splatter mani! This was, without doubt, the messiest thing I've ever tried to do with nail polish, but it was also quite fun and the end result has turned out pretty cool! I started with a base of Revlon-Sunshine Sparkle-a gorgeous pale yellow with silver sparkles shimmering through it, that I've wanted to wear ever since I found it in the pound shop a month or so ago. Sadly, it took me 4 coats to get it anything approaching opaque, so I'll probably layer it over a white next time I use it!

Then I splattered over the top (by blowing polish through a drinking straw) with Essie-Mojito Madness (my new absolute favourite green polish!) and Sally Hansen Complete Manicure-Himalayan Blue which have combined to make a messy splattery spring themed mani:

I think I prefer my right hand to my left because the splatter is a bit more sparse as opposed to large blobs of colour. I almost removed my left middle finger to do it again but couldn't be bothered to faff with the yellow base again. I think my left little finger and right thumb are my favourites-they both have a good even distribution of both the colours.

Overall-I really like this. It's a really messy technique and takes ages to clean up, but the effect is so random and crazy that it's worth it. Plus there are limitless combinations of colours you could use, and some of them would look AMAZING. I'll definitely be doing this again in the future!

It's good to be back =)

~Nail Art Novice~