April 30 Day Challenge Day 7: Rainbow

I love rainbow nails and I love sponging gradients so I knew what I wanted to do for this day of the challenge. I chose some pastel shades so that my rainbow was a bit softer looking and not too in your face! (The result looks very My Little Pony-esque to me – not sure if that’s a good thing or not!!)

I ‘m always in two minds when I do a gradient whether to show pictures of it before applying a top coat when it has that interesting sponged texture or once it’s been all smoothed out and looks more ‘finished’. I like both looks so I decided to put two pics up today. One of the pre-top coat and glitter that I added on a whim, and one of the raw sponged gradient.

I used: Warwick Avenue – Nails Inc, Secret of Love – Anny, Mellow Yellow – Sally Hansen, Keep Calm Paint On – China Glaze, Dreamer – Revlon, Do You Lilac It? -OPI, Hello Holo – Essence

Day 9 Pre-Spring Challenge: Rainbow

I had wanted to try a pinwheel design for a while and thought it was one which might go nicely with today’s rainbow theme. I looked up various tutorials but liked this one by indigonova1 best.

It was quite tricky and took me much longer than I expected! I didn’t quite manage to get the curves on the lines to make it look as swirled as the one in the tutorial, so it ended up looking more like a rainbow sun with rays rather than a pinwheel. As it’s a design I like, I’ll have to come back to pinwheels another day and perhaps try something less ambitious using only 2 colours next time.

I used: Revlon Red – Revlon, Psychedelic Orange – Rimmel, Yellow – Sweets Sweet, Symons Street – Nails Inc, Baker Street – Nails Inc, Delinquent – Urban Decay, white acrylic paint.

Rainbow taped nails

I had seen loads of tutorials on nail taping, all emphasising its suitability for beginners and thought it was definitely worth trying. I liked the bold contrast between black and rainbow colours in this YouTube tutorial by superwowstyle, who has a lot of really nice tutorial videos and some great designs.

I can’t say I was thrilled with the result. Taping is definitely trickier than they make it look in these videos! My strips of tape were clearly too wide and the gaps between them too narrow, the placement was uneven and I guess I didn’t stick them down carefully enough as some black seems to have leaked under the tape, leaving the lines looking a lot less straight and neat than I wanted!

Not to be totally negative about this, it was a great learning experience and next time I’ll know a lot of the pitfalls to avoid! I’ll also leave way more time, as cutting the tape and getting it all ready took ages! I guess it wasn’t a total disaster, the black and rainbow contrast is still quite nice, but it’s not going to be one of my proudest nail art moments.

I used: Revlon Red – Revlon, Yellow – Sweets Sweet, Matte Aqua – BYS and Black -Decorative Nail