Nail Art

Something I'm not terribly good at or experienced in, but I enjoy nonetheless is nail art. I started a few months ago just trying to do something a little different and fun. I was feeling a huge urge to paint some Warhammer miniatures, but I didn't bring any up to Darwin with me as I only had room for essentials. So I decided to give nail art a bash.

I don't have a terribly steady hand and I'm not much of a painter, so its all very amateurish stuff compared to most people who do it. But I still have fun doing it and I like having nails that are a bit more interesting and conversational than just painting them one colour.

I tend to spend very little on my nail polish. I think about $6 is probably my maximum for one bottle. I'm sure better results could be achieved with expensive brands, but I simply can't bring myself to spend $20 per colour.

So I thought today I might share a few examples of the styles I've done so hopefully someone other than myself can enjoy them. Please excuse the mess around the nails. I often take pictures before I bother doing a proper clean up of stray nail polish. Bad habit, I know.

This one was meant to resemble a night sky... but I failed lol. It was one of my earliest attempts so I suppose it isn't too bad. I used a silver base, then sponged a royal blue over it, then black on the tips. Finally I put a coat of silver glitter over the top. 

 This one was meant to look like little shirts with peter pan collars. I decided to alternate colours just to make things a little less uniform. I really liked the way they came out, even if they were a little messy.

These were another attempt at sponging and getting a gradient thing happening. I'm still not very good at that. These have a silver base, with purple sponged on top and then pink lightly sponged over that.









These ones turned out pretty messy! I went for a criss cross pattern but I had nothing to keep the lines straight. It was all freehand and I'm quite bad at that. Purple base with pink lines and silver dots.

I decided to try something a little more complex, but very forgiving for those of us not great at fine detail. I did galaxy nails and loooooved them! There are quite a few steps involved with this one, so I used a tutorial instead of just winging it. I used this Youtube video for guidance. The voice over is a little dramatic, but its a good tutorial anyway. Mine didn't come out quite as perfect, but I think they still looked pretty cool.

This design is really simple, but still fun and eye-catching. I did a base of blue then painted one side black, and alternated various geometric patterns down the centre as a divider between the two colours. By now you're probably noticing I'm a big fan of blues and purples, but I think this would look great in any contrasting colours.









I really liked this design and wore them to death. It was my first time experimenting with decals and stencils. I used grey as my base, then did a stripe of baby blue on most of my nails. On either side of the baby blue I painted a fine white line to outline it. Then I started adding my stencils and decals. I like my nails to match without being the same, so I tried to keep the designs unique.



This last one was my most recent attempt at something interesting and special. Its definitely my favourite so far. I felt so girly and feminine. I alternated bases between a soft purple and a mint green. On top of that I did white stripes on some of my nails, and dots on a few others. Again, I wanted variation in design, but still have them be tied in to one another. Once the stripes and dots had dried, I used a light salmony pink and a darker browny pink to create the roses. I used a dotting tool to splodge on a rough shape of a rose, then with a fine brush, I painted some rough lines to create the look of petals. I did each rose one at a time so the light pink was still wet when painting on the darker petals, this helped them blend in nicely.