Finger Food’s Theme Buffet: Dots and Stripes

I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to do for this prompt, so started browsing through a whole load of dotty and stripy manis to see if something might jump out at me. And the one which stood out was this gorgeous mani by Nuthin But A Nail Thing. I loved her combination of dots and stripes and though it looked fun and playful at the same time as being a really cool looking design.

The only thing was it meant using tape, again. That’s my third taped mani this week! And it was also my most successful! maybe I’m actually starting to improve!

I painted all my nails orange and then randomly placed the striping tape to mask stripes of different widths and painted the gaps black, white and gold like in my inspiration mani. After that I added dots along the length of the stripes with two or three different sized doting tools.

Now the weird thing about this mani is that I used a white polish (My Boyfriend Scales Walls by OPI which is my go to white) and it somehow transformed into a pale yellow. The orange paint was 100% dry. I’m sure of this because I painted them orange the night before I did the stripes and dots, so there was a good 12 hours drying time plus a top coat between the white and the orange. Still it started to look a bit yellow just minutes after application, even stronger by the time I took the photo, and later on they were a fairly bright yellow colour! I’ve never had that happen before!

Despite ending up with yellow stripes rather than white ones, I enjoyed doing this mani and was pleased with the result.

I used: Tulip – Rituals, Lady in Black – OPI, My Boyfriend Scales Walls – OPI, A Piece of Forever – Essence.

GOT Polish Challenge: Dots

My idea for this one was to do a kind of gradient of dot sizes from big fat ones at one corner of the nail to little tiny ones in the opposite corner. The size gradient didn’t come out as clearly as I’d hoped it would but I still love the combination of these two polishes, and that is after all what this challenge is about – rediscovering old polishes that you love!

I think these were the first two polishes I bought after moving to Spain in October 2012 and I’d never heard of the makeup brand GOSH before. I don’t think they’re a massively popular brand but they have some lovely bright colours and are sold in quite a lot of cosmetics stores in Spain.

So a great colour combination, but I think I’ll come back and try the design again another time and rethink how to make it more striking looking.

I used: Miss Grey – GOSH, Ocean – GOSH

I’m back! 33DC – Dots

Well with such a busy summer I just didn’t have time for nail art, but now I’m back in Spain I thought I needed to give myself a bit of a kick and get going with it again. I noticed that Crumpet’s Nail Tarts was starting a new 33 day challenge but with just 3 manis a week (which seems way more achievable after having a couple of months off) so I thought I’d join in and try and get my skills back to where they were before the summer and hopefully learn a few new tricks too!

The first day was a nice easy one: dots. I decided to keep it simple but then at the last minute added some glittery dots which I think was a mistake and makes it too busy. Still I’m glad to be back to having something pretty on my nails and not just plain colours!

I used: A-taupe the Space Needle – OPI, French Quarter for Your Thoughts – OPI, Honk if you Love OPI – OPI, Copper’ize Me – Essence

And here’s the challenge info:

Day 4 Pre-Spring Challenge: Flowers

For day 4 of the Pre-Spring Challenge I decided to return to the dotted flowers which I did a few months back when I first started to become interested in nail art. I was inspired by this fun floral design by Imagination in Colour who took the simple dotted flower and turned it into something with a lot more eye catching appeal.

I was really pleased with the result and I’ve certainly made a lot of progress since my first faltering dotty flowers last year.

I used: Ocean – Gosh (base colour) Psychedelic Orange – Rimmel, Warwick Avenue – Nails Inc, Baker Street – Nails Inc, Yellow – Sweets Sweet, Notting Hill Gate – Nails Inc, Coco – Sephora.

The more awake bright psychedelic orange!

Or at least that’s what google translate says is the name of the rimmel nail polish I have from Japan…

I returned to my grey polish but thought this time I would brighten things up with some bright orange dots and an accent nail with the colours reversed.

It was a simple but fun and effective manicure which I was very happy with. I always feel pleased when I manage to create something nice using only the dotting tool – it gives me hope that even beginners can create beautiful nail art!

Before writing this post I thought it was time I found out the name of the orange I used. It was one I got in japan but it was Rimmel so I thought i’d just be able to put the number in and find out the name in English. Turns out there’s no “speedy finish” collection outside Japan, so I had to look it up on the Japanese Rimmel site. I worked out the part in katakana (Japanese ‘alphabet’) which says psychedelic orange, but needed some help from google translate for the string of kanji at the beginning. It came out as: the more awake bright psychedelic orange. (or
目が覚めるほど 鮮やかなサイケデリックオレンジ if you can read Japanese)

So… I used: Miss Grey – Gosh, The more awake bright psychedelic orange – Rimmel (Japan)

Dotty French

I’d been browsing various items with tutorials for beginners and found loads of great ones at nailsmag.com. I loved this design as soon as I saw it. I also knew it would be within my abilities and was excited to try something that looked so effective but relatively simple.

I wanted mine to look a bit more summery than the one in the tutorial so I picked bright, bold, happy colours. My nails were a lot shorter than the ones in the tutorial so I also had to be careful to limit the number of dots. There was the temptation to go overboard and it was difficult to know when to stop. I think I got the balance right and didn’t overdo it.
I was pretty pleased with this one. Some of my dots could be neater, but I still love this design and I’m sure it’s one I’ll revisit in future.