Brighten Up A Lonely Day

Hello lovelies!

Today's mani was born out of me just pulling out random colours from my untried pile that I thought looked quite good together. I started with a base of the very gorgeous Dark Metal Lacquer-Lonely Day which is a grey polish with a subtle linear holo running through it that I think looks really pretty. To add a little colour I pulled out two bright matte polishes-Barry M-Cancun and Sinful Colors-Dream On. I did a skittle mani with various different vinyls and tapes to make different shapes on the nail.

I actually really like the contrast between the matte and the holo and I think the colours are fab too! HOw about you?

Happy weekend!

~Nail Art Novice ~

Polish of the Week: A-England-Iseult

Hello loves! How's your weekend going?

I've got another POTW today in the form of A-England-Iseult. I have used this polish on the blog before but I don't mind an excuse to do so again-I am always surprised by how pretty it is. Iseult is a very pale pink polish with a silvery shimmer to it-very delicate and pretty. I used it as the base for my cloud mani today and used Freckles Polish holos over the top in Purple Planters Punch and Blue Hawaii.

Please excuse my poor ring finger-in the last week I've had really bad breaks on both my ring fingers so I've had to bring all my other nails down a bit to match-sigh!

Ohhh it looks so sad and nubbiny =(

I really like the way the light catches these-those holos are gorgeous colours and Iseult is the perfect base for them I reckon. I love the rainbows/shimmers you can see on my thumb nail pic! It's a really girly mani but actually I don't mind it, for once!

What do you reckon?

~Nail Art Novice~

Don't forget the Tara's Talons store re-opens at midnight tonight and you can get 50% off with the code BACK50!

Polish Of The Week: Rimmel-Serene

Hello lovelies!
Here's the start of a new feature on my blog that I'm hoping to do every week if I get chance. I, like many other nail polish addicts, have an ever growing collection of polishes and some of them don't get much chance to see the light of day all that often. For Polish of the Week (POTW) I'm going to choose a polish with a random number generator and my swatch book numbers and then use it in some nail art. This was an idea that I first came across on the lovely Vicky Loves Nails' blog where she calls it Pick A Polish and I thought it was a really clever idea to make sure you use some of those long forgotten beauties in your stash. I hope she doesn't mind me borrowing her idea here!

So my first POTW was Rimmel-Serene, a lovely white shimmery polish. It is unfortunately rather sheer so for this (pre-clean up!) photo I used two coats over a layer of white undies.

For my nail art I did a quick striping tape mani, using Sinful Colors-Let's Talk over the top. For some reason my camera just couldn't see this colour properly and has made it much more blue than it actually was

This one (normal lighting) is more colour accurate but still doesn't really show how bright this shimmery purple is-I'd suggest googling some swatches if you want to see it in all it's brightness!

I also had a friend visiting at the time and she wanted me to do her nails too so of course I obliged! She had a lovely maxi dress with chevrons on it and asked if I could match her nails to it. I used Serene and Smitten Polish-Bifrost plus some chevron vinyls and really like how they turned out!

I think I actually like hers more than mine, plus that holo polish looked amazing in the sunshine at the beach we visited.

So that's my first POTW done, hope you enjoyed it!

~Nail Art Novice~

Geckos And ZigZags And Holos, Oh My!

Hello lovely readers! How's your weekend going? I've been home alone since Friday and I'm kinda bored and lonely now, boo!

I used a couple of lovely holo polishes for this mani- GOSH-Holographic Hero and Too Fancy Lacquer-Cooper Trooper. I also used nail vinyls from Nail Stickrs (zigzags) and Vinyl Boutique (geckos that Rara got me for my birthday!).

Hehe I love those adorable little geckos as well as those colours together (I'm not a Slytherin, promise!), plus the holoy ness of course! I'm a little sad the sun's gone away at the moment because it means my holos only light up like this when I'm doing the washing up! Ah well, this is Britain, haha!

Enjoy the rest of your Sundays folks!

~Nail Art Novice~

Fingerfood's Theme Buffet: Science and Technology

Hello loves!

It's been a while since I joined in with the Fingerfood challenge but when I saw this week's theme was science and technology (two of my favourite things!) I just had to do this one. I treated myself to some Messy Mansion stamping plates a good while ago and haven't had opportunity to use them yet. The one I used today is my fave of the three I got-MM25-a science themed plate that I just love! I couldn't decide which full nail design I liked best so I just used all of them, plus some of the smaller designs on my thumb.

Base colour is Sinful Colors-Shine Annie which was sent to me from America in an awesome parcel of goodies from the wonderful Liz who is the creative genius behind A Mani Maniac and really made my day! Shine Annie is a gorgeous bright red, slightly jelly like and full of a shimmer that my camera refused to see. I used three coats to get rid of VNL although probably could have only gone with two.

 I stamped on top of it using Color Club-Over The Moon for both the contrasting colour and the sort of shiny shimmery technology sort of feel to it (I might be talking nonsense here =p)

First pic without flash to actually show the stamping and second pic with flash to show the pretties =D I'm loving the rainbows and those designs! I think my favourite is the DNA strands though.

Don't forget to check out the other nerdy nails in the inlinkz

~Nail Art Novice~

31 Week Nail Art Challenge 10-Gradients (And HOLOS)

I realised that I did a gradient last week for my rainbow nails so I would have to do something a little different this week. Instead of creating one gradient with lots of colours I created lots of gradients with only two colours instead-and managed to use 7 of my untrieds (denoted with a *) to boot!

Polishes used (thumb to little finger on right hand): Freckles Polish-French Martini, Freckles Polish-Purple Planters Punch*, Freckles Polish-Blue Hawai*, Smitten Polish-Bifrost, Too Fancy Lacquer-Cooper Trooper*, Freckles Polish-Caipirinha* (no, I have no idea how to pronounce it either =p), GOSH-Holographic Hero, Layla-Flash Black*, A England-Rose Bower* and Layla-Retro Pink*. Phew! They aren't the best gradients in the world, I think some of them needed a third colour in the middle to get them to blend properly, and some of the Laylas had a pig of a formula to try and do gradients with, but overall I'm happy with them! They look really awesome when they catch the light!

Taken in the fab lighting in my kitchen to
try and show you those rainbows!

What do you reckon? Are you a holo lover or hater? (How can you hate them, they're so pretty!?)

Also how is it JUNE already?! I'm going away in 18 days, eeeep!

~Nail Art Novice~

31WNAC 4-Green

Hello lovelies!
Sorry it's been so long since I last posted, I went away with my Gospel Choir last weekend and didn't manage to post beforehand! This is my green mani for my 31 Week Nail Art Challenge and I decided to do interlocking dots with a couple of holos. I got A England-Dragon in their anniversary sale at the start of the month (oops, had a little splurge!) and wanted another green to go with it. None of my green holos went that well (means I totally need more, right? =p) but in the end I went with Color Club-Angel Kiss so it would show up well. It looks really blue in these pictures but it's definitely green IRL!

I really like these, I love the way the colours play together and the two different holos work together. Dragon is just gorgeous too, that lovely red shimmer is a nice surprise! These looked amazing in the sun today in the park.

As a bonus, here's the nails I wore on tour-can you guess where we went? (These aren't the best nail art ever, they were done at about 1 am!)

I had a really brilliant time away and did lots of awesome singing! But I hope to post more regularly now I'm back lol.

Laters,

~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~

And Make It Evergreen

Hey loves! How's things? Feels weird being back on my blog again after ignoring it for a couple of weeks, but back I am, and with a gorgeous polish too! Before I get onto that though, I just want to apologise for the state of my cuticles/hands in general. I've been visiting my boyfriend (who is still in hospital!) every day and the combination of the crappy weather plus LOTS of antibac hand gel on the ward is ruining my skin-so please try to ignore the bleedy/cracked/dryness of them as much as you can!

Now onto nicer things-the polish! This is Black Cat Lacquer-Evergreen. I saw this in one of the nail-related FB groups I'm in and it was green, had scattered holo sparkles and smelt of cinnamon-all things I totally love, so I knew I had to have it! As a bonus, it's also a thermal (my first) which was kinda fun to play with too!

Warm state

Cold state

Best transition photo I could get cos my hands warm up too quickly!

Seriously, this is just stunning! It's so green and sparkly, and although the warm colour is a little sheer it's still absolutely lovely! And the smell is AMAZING-it really makes me hungry for cinnamon buns and biscuits and stuff. It has faded a little over the three days I've been wearing it but it's still there, nom nom nom.

What do you reckon to this one-love it as much as me?

~Nail Art Novice~

Space Dust And Stamping

I've got a sparkly sparkly mani for you today! Before Xmas I picked up one of the new Rimmel Space Dust polishes-Total Eclipse. It's a gorgeous black polish with duochromey flakes in-they shift from fuchsia to green in the bottle and it's just a lovely effect. The Space Dust polishes are technically textured ones, but I found that there wasn't really much texture to this one once it was applied. More than a creme, yes, but less than some of the other textured polishes I have tried.

This is three coats of Total Eclipse on it's own, isn't it pretty!

I decided that, pretty as it was, I was going to add some stamping to it. I used Color Club-Over The Moon and MoYou London-Back To The 80s 2 for a cool space age/time travelly sort of effect. My camera really didn't like this combo, it was a bit dazzled! I also added a layer of topcoat to smooth everything out.

Sorry this is a bit pic heavy, I was trying to get good ones:

As I said, my camera was pretty dazzled but I think you can still see how cool this looked...right? I've been playing with the holo sparkles in the light a lot =D

~Nail Art Novice~

Don't forget to enter my giveaway!! Closes in three days!

I Hate Cleaning Up!

I really do, I reckon it's one of the worst bits about being a nail blogger and sometimes it takes twice as long as the mani itself-so annoying! I was having a discussion about this in a FB group once and lots of ladies seemed to agree with me so I decided to set up a bit of a silly collaborative post showing off our messiest nails without cleaning up first. Nail blogging doesn't always need to be serious, after all, and I thought it would be a bit of fun! Here's my effort, and it's gloriously messy!

Polishes used: Color Club Holo Hues-Kismet, Angel Kiss and Over The Moon. These were my last treat to myself of 2013 before my buying restrictions came in this year, and they're simply BEAUTIFUL. So much sparkle! I used the three together as a gradient and then stamped over the top with Sally Hansen-Purple Bolt and MoYou London-Pro 9. I still need a lot of practice placing my stamps but I love the colours together, and the way the holo smacks you in the face is pretty amazing.

And just in case you wanted to see it all cleaned up too...here's the finished product (I have recently discovered what a wonder PVA glue is for helping clean up and I will admit it makes it so much quicker! Still my least favourite job though!) :

Yay for messy manis!

~Nail Art Novice~

12 Days Of Xmas Nail Art 12-Freestyle Christmas

Well we've finally reached almost the end of December and the end of this little challenge! I'm quite sad to see it go, I've had a fantastic time doing these and shared the experience with some really lovely ladies. Originally my plan was to choose some of their manis to do on my nails today but there have been so many lovely ones that I couldn't just choose 10, and I also would not be able to do them credit at all. So instead I want to dedicate this mani to lovely ladies who have taken part alongside me-there's been over 150 fabulous designs created for the various prompts and I, for one, have really enjoyed myself. I want to say thankyou to everyone who took part with me, whether it was just once or every mani-I never thought when I had this idea in November it would have become something this great! You've all been really awesome company, and I've loved seeing so many different designs. I can't wait to see what you've all come up with for today!

My 'freestyle' mani is made up of various things I've done along the way, and I used about 30 polishes in total for it! I won't list them, most of them have been used in the other Xmas posts anyway, but if there's one you want to know for definite just ask =) Also I used this tutorial from The Little Canvas to do the reindeer.

Here we are then, my final Christmas mani of 2013:

And just because it's Christmas, and I haven't yet, here's some pics using decorations too:

I can't believe it's over! Look out for my round up coming soon, but other than that I would just like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas (if you celebrate it), and I will be back after the festivities have quietened down a little!

~Nail Art Novice~

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 9-Snowmen

I was looking at my manis for this challenge and realised none of them were particularly in your face bright amazing colours, so I decided to rectify that for this prompt! The base for this mani is the ever beautiful Tara's Talons-Ol' Blue Eyes (over a similar base colour to make it more opaque) and it's just gorgeous. My little fingers have decals I got on Ebay here and then the rest of the snowmen were freehanded all with a dotting tool. Other polishes: Rimmel-Serene, W7-Black, Barry M-Mango and Rimmel-Red Carpet.

When I was doing these I wasn't sure I was going to like them but actually I'm pretty pleased with the way they've turned out in the end! I love the contrast of colours over that blue, think it looks fab!

Rara
Polishes used Avon-Starry Sky, on my thumb is Tara's Talons-I Love Winter and on my ring finger is Tara's Talons-Ice Ice Baby then Paperchase nail art pens. The only problem I encountered was with the I Love Winter...it took me AGES to get any of the snowflakes and stars out it was mostly the polish that came out.
I didn't want to do a conventional snowman as I'd already done one in an earlier post. So I decided to do the main aspects of a snowman...the carrot, scarf and hat. I apologise now about the smudges on my nails...I took the photos after a trip to the pub and also I piggled the skin on my little finger...oops!! So I am including the photo I took before I did my clean up. Only 3 left :'(

Only 3 left :'(
~Rara~

Don't forget to check out the other lovely snowmen in the inlinkz. Also, does anyone else now have 'Do You Wanna Build A Snowman?' from Frozen in their head? LOVE that film!

Until next time,

~Nail Art Novice~

12 Days Of Xmas Nail Art 6-Decorations

-PIC HEAVY POST-

Do you ever have those moments where you do some really awesome nail art that you're really proud of one one hand and just know you're not going to be able to recreate it well on the other? Yeah, this was one of those! I took inspiration for these from Chalkboard Nails' Functional Christmas Lights and for this decided to stray away from the Christmas colours I've been sticking to at the mo! I did a base of Revlon-Minted and then topped it with my Iconic Effect-Extreme Holo Topcoat...because I couldn't resist using it again haha! I did the "string" with my black Barry M nail art pen and drew "bulbs" with the white to provide a good base for my slightly jelly like glow in the dark polishes. I used BK Polishes in 05, 06 and 10 to colour them in. On my thumb I did a sort of Christmas tree with the lights which I really like. Then it came to my right hand. My Barry M pens started playing up and the bulbs all came out different sizes and shapes. I did attempt the tree to match but it just wasn't playing so I gave up in the end, haha! Ah well, can't have it all ey?
I feel I should warn you that my camera was a little dazzled by the holoyness of these, poor thing, so these are a little blurry around the edges.

While one hand is definitely better than the other, I do really like these! And look, they really glow:

GITD nail varnish makes me so happy, which is good because I had crappy news today so I needed a pick me up!
Anyway, let's see Rara's decorations too!

Rara
I had absolutely no idea how to do decorations...so I kind of cheated. I decided to use a new polish from a TarasTalons goodie bag called Paper Chains. I layered it over the top of Avon-Forget-Me-Not Blue. Paper Chain is a beautiful many coloured glitter and makes me happy! To try to match it I painted my other nails with Layla-Mermaid Spell (Holographic effect) and attempted paper chains with my nail pens from Paperchase. Not sure you could tell what they are unless I had already told you though!

Bring on Christmas Animals!!!!

~Rara~

I actually really like those paperchains, they're so colourful, and that glitter is loooovely! There you go, lots of holoy goodness and pretty decorations. Here's a reminder of the rest of the prompts, can't believe we're half way through already!

Don't forget to check out the inlinkz for some more fabulous 'decorations' manis!

~Nail Art Novice~