Time Periods Challenge: 4 – Ancient Mayan

I was excited about this day of Llama Nails’ time periods challenge but found it really tricky. I lived in Mexico for two years and visited a lot of ruins while I lived there. Palenque is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever been to and left a lasting impression on me. I wanted to incorporate some ideas from Palenque but everything I came up with was way too detailed and difficult to do on such tiny little canvases (and they’re even tinier than they used to be – a week of sunshine, camping and scuba diving was not kind to my nails and they are in a horrific state!)

In the end I looked for border patterns used to decorate the edges of fabrics, stone etc and thought that they would work well on nails. I also borrowed the design idea from a tribal design on Lucy’s Stash. I used the colours red, yellow, white and black as these are representative of the ordinal directions in Mayan culture.

So here it is! (Excuse the short, not so pretty looking nails!)

I used: My Boyfriend Scales Walls – OPI, Mellow Yellow – Sally Hansen, St James – Nails Inc, Black Passion – GOSH.