Challenge Week 45: Tribal Mani

For this week's mani I got inspired by Robin Moses. She has an awe inspiring youtube channel where she shares all her wonderful nail art designs. It is a bit overwhelming to watch when you are starting out in nail art but after a while you realise that you can actually accomplish most of her designs as long as you do it to suit your own level.

This particular design is what inspired me:

As you can see mine are nowhere near as gorgeous as hers ;)

I used my three barryM gelly polishes for this mani as well as Zoya Arizona, a-england Lancelot and nails inc. culross st.

As usual my top coat dragged the design, not sure what to do about it, this time I let it dry for 15 minutes before applying top coat. If you have any advice on how to avoid this suggestions are highly appreciated!

Ninja Polish Color Changing Garnet

As you saw in my spider web mani I am the very proud owner of Ninja Polish Color Changing Garnet, a gorgeous multi chrome polish filled with gorgeous micro glitter. It is part of Ninjapolish's Facets collection which also consists of Zultanite and Alexandrite

I decided to layer it over a-england Lancelot, I thought the reddish tint in this black polish would be very appropriate for it.

The polish is very easy to work with and applies evenly and has great coverage when you layer it, I used one coat for the result you see here.

The colour shift in it is out of this world, it shifts through dark red, gold and green though I wasn't able to get all that amazingness into my pictures, the green hue kept eluding me though you can see it in the bottle and on the nail in sunlight - oh and the glitter is chromatic as well:

This is bottled awesomeness so if you are a fan of duo and multi chrome nail polish I highly recommend you acquire one of these, you can buy it at the NinjaPolish store .

Challenge Week 41: Patchwork Mani

Searching for examples of patchwork manis will most likely get loads of hits on tape manis and though I'm a BIG fan of those - yes I have learned something since this debacle I decided to do the Other one - which is...da-da-daaaaa:

Yeah, I was smiling too when I realised these patches weren't stitched to the bottom layer :D

Anyhoo, I never got around to finish them so it is what it is...I do love the colours together so that is a big plus for me.

These were the colours I used:
Bottom layer: Illamasqua Eclipse
Light cornflower blue patch: Illamasqua Caress
Mint green patch: Illamasqua Milf
Stitches: a-england Camelot

By the way: These are the first pictures taken in my light tent...Soooo happy with how these turned out.

Challenge Week 40: Animal Print Mani

This one has been decided by the twins - they think tigers are awesome so tiger print  it is :)

I looked at a lot of tutorials for this one and zebra and tiger stripes seem to be very close so I tried to capture the different colours of the tiger's fur to set it apart.

I sponged colours in spots on white base and did it random on each nail.

I used the following colours:
White: nails inc. floral st.
Yellow: nails inc. notting hill carnival
Orange: Zoya Arizona
Light brown: OPI Over the Taupe
Black: a-england Lancelot

They look better from a distance than what you see here but you get the concept :) Definitely fun to do so I think I'll do this again sometime - or I might even give leopard print a shot.

Challenge Week 34: "Bling" Mani

So I have finally caught up on my challenges, hooray!!!

As some may have noticed I am going through my untrieds in order to get through that huge part of my stash that I still haven't worn. And this is true for this manicure as well.

When I first thought about this manicure I decided to choose the glitter polish first and then decide which underwear to use.

I have been wanting Deborah Lippmann Today Was a Fairy Tale since I first saw Michelle Mismas from All Lacquered Up posting about it on her blog a couple of years ago. A couple of months ago one of my fellow Danish polish-a-holics had a purge sale and I was lucky enough to get it!! I find it fittingly blingy to use it for this mani :).

I love a-england polishes but haven't worn any of my newly acquired yet. So I looked through them and found King Arthur would be a good match for TWAF.

 I then blinged it further up with an accent nail with rhinestones I found in a box with pearls.

So this is it for now, I hope I can find time to blog on other polishes than my challenges during the next couple of weeks :). Look out for some DandyNails love...

ID4

And as if I haven't blogged enough today...

Once more I have a group collaboration mani to show you. Originally I wasn't going to do anything July 4th on my blog, but I couldn't help myself when a ID4 group post was announced.

To celebrate ID4 I whipped out an OPI and a China Glaze and did a little something with them:

After that super elaborate Canada mani I needed something a little simpler

No amount of cream seemed to change the cuticle dryness

Colours used:
Blue: OPI Dating a Royal
Red: China Glaze Phat Santa
White: nails inc. floral st.
Silver: a-england Excalibur

Now go and check out the rest of the Independence Day Manicures out from my wonderful blogger friends.

Challenge Weeks 8 and 9: Corset and Vintage mani - picture heavy

I finally got my transfer cables for my dslr - which means I can finally get these up and running.

I was excited to see I was supposed to do a corset mani - I love corsets and think they can look absolute stunning. So I searched a bit to find some great tutorials and found nihrida's tutorial that makes this a very easy nail art challenge to master:

I did it at little bit different though, since I wanted it to be a bit more colourful. The colours I used were

Milani Totally Cool
a-england Camelot
Essence Stamp Me!! Silver

I made some mistakes but I still liked how it turned out:

I decided to do four lace holes which is not to be recommended when you have rather short nails

The crosses tend to get cramped together and do not look like crosses AT ALL

The one that looks like a Southern Whore has gotten her sh**faced punter to do her up

Though a very dark pic it actually captures the purple shimmery goodness of the Milani polish

These were taken on one of the first sunny days in a long time here in Denmark - and still it was hard to catch the right purple shade, it comes off slightly more blue than in person.

Now on to the Vintage Mani of Week 8 - and I am certain I was not the only one that had to do a google search for this particular nail style :D.

Basically, back in...back in olden days (I love me some Eddie Izzard!!) nail polish was a luxury commodity and if you owned it you were more than likely going to try to get it to last a very long time. In order to do that it was not uncommon to leave the tips and moons bare. And since red was the name of the game your nails would have looked something like this:

Courtesy of Brook Owens

And here is a short tutorial by Super Kawaii Mama:


http://vimeo.com/3950676


And now on to my Vitage Mani. Since I don't have really opaque moons and my nails are peeling like there is no tomorrow, I decided to do a slight variation on the theme and came up with something I have been really happy about.

Recently I got Josie from Glitter, Glam, Sparkle, Shine to pick up a Lucky Dip from nails inc. (you pay a ridiculously low amount of greenies, they pick your polish colours) for me and I decided to take two of them for a spin.

Two colours that I usually won't fall for, but these two are beautiful - montrose place is a blue toned pink that flashes blue clearly in sunshine and flash light, and the awesome gold foil that is westminster abbey

This looks coral but you will soon see this is an in-your-face pink shade

And now to the nails - please marvel at the pink-blue gorgeousness that is montrose place:

And it is even more awesome in person!!!

I actually did this in free hand, Yay me!! If you have read my ealier posts you will know I suck monkeys balls when it comes to anything where I have to apply my free hand skills - but this was actually quite easy to work with, I blame it on the polish which was nothing but perfection regarding application and opacity.

Well this is it from me for now, hopefully I will get back on track with the blogging.

Challenge Week 6: Half Moon Mani

So this week's year challenge coinsided with a Danish film prize award celebration which I attended together with my mom - and that meant I wanted to go all-in bling, haha.

But one bad thing happened during the past week: my mobile phone which I have used for a larger part of my pictures, took a deep bow and left. And my new phone is really no good for capturing anything closer than 10 yards away! So I apologise beforehand for the crappy pictures you are about to be subjected to.

I used the following polishes for this:
a-england Escalon
a-england Bridal Veil
Lynnderella Shape Shifter

I used nail guides to get the "moon" shape.

As you can see they are one blurry mess but luckily you can somehow get an idea of where I wanted to go with this. It looked awesome in person but I still need to figure out a way to get the properly rounded "moons" with my nail guides. I think I will try the reinforcer technique next time ;)

Hope you enjoyed this rather blurry version of the 52 week challenge.

Challenge Week 5: Newspaper mani

I was going to post this  yesterday, but as the last in the family, I am now sick as h***. Luckily I did these nails saturday before it got really bad.

This week's challenge was relatively easy to get done. I had seen different tutorials around the net that does this differently, but most of them involve alcohol. I chose to dip my fingers in alcohol and the press the cutout piece of newspaper on my wet finger, as shown in this tutorial by Cutepolish:

I opted for a slightly more colourful polish than straight up gray, since I thought it would be a little cuter to look at. Further more I chose clippings from a paper commercial which is in colour, just to see if it was possible to transfer other than just basic print.

As base colour I chose a-englands Guinevere, a lovely pale grayed out lilac:

And here is the result:

Here you can really see the different print on my thumb - it was a red circle with yellow text.

I think I will do coloured prints again, that was a big succes I think.

This was a very fun one, though I couldn't get a really solid print on any of the nails except my thumb.
What do you think of newspaper manis? I think I like them - a lot!

Challenge Week 4: Plaid Mani

Finally!!! A challenge nail art mani that actually doesn't have major fail in it :D.

My inspiration for this week's manicure was this:

And this:

I really like the Burberry Plaid, and I thought it could be fairly easily done - and I was actually right this time. I didn't swear a lot during this and I believe that I have actually slightly improved my free hand skills.

The colours I have used this time are these:

Cult Nails: Cruisin' Nude, nails inc: Oxford Circus, a-england: Camelot, China Glaze: Phat Santa, nails inc: Floral St.

And this is the result:

And a detailed look:

I must say I am over the moon about this design, seen from a slight distance it looks really cool! I really didn't think I would succeed with this after watching tutorials due to my earlier free hand failures, haha.

Thanks for looking and please do leave a message if you have any notes on this.