Nails | The Adventures of a Nail Artoholic

I have no idea how long it’s been since my last post, I don’t even want to guess. It’s been a while. We’ll leave it at that. I go through times where I miss blogging, and struggle to find the time to paint my nails these days, let along blog about them! I thought I’d take this opportunity (aka. revision break) to explore my nail art history and my favourite nail design.

Highlights

OMD2/3

Oh mon Dieu, OMD2 and 3 are highlights of my blogging adventure. They motivated me to keep painting, despite the nail polish fumes along they way. Once again a massive thank you to all of the nail accounts involved in making the contest possible!

OMD was a great opportunity for me. Creativity becomes limited regardless of your artistic ability. I would like to count myself as a creative person (Update: I am about to embark on a course which could kick-start my art career! Exciting stuff), however, I spend hours scrolling through Pinterest wondering where my next source of creativity will come from. The OMD nail challenge changed this attitude. The daily prompts were enough to get my brain into thinking mode and I created some of my favourite (and least favourite!) designs. It was a brilliant challenge and fingers crossed, there will be another one this year!

Fire inspired nails

Fire nails from OMD

Paris

As regular readers may know, I am in love with the city of Paris. I love incorporating the Eiffel tower and France into my nail art and I hope to create a new design soon…

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Techniques

I have learnt a lot thanks to blogging. I have explored just a small percentage of the amount of nail tools on offer in the world and I have been lucky enough to receive samples off some companies. Some of my favourite nail art has been created with stamping plates. They’re a little messy but it’s so worth it for the end result. If all goes to plan of course.

This is one of my favourite ever stamped designs, using the Born pretty plate that I reviewed here

Freehand

My freehand work is pretty dodgy these days as I don’t practise my skills as much. Looking back though, I still feel quite proud of myself for creating this freehand design with a striper brush and a dotting tool, on a pretty OPI base colour.

Dry Marble

This has got to be my favourite and go-to technique. It works with practically every colour, and any design. Have a spare nail and not sure what to paint on it? Dry water marble. Want some swirly crazy colour combinations? Dry water marble. It’s my nail art solution. I love adding glitters and nail frames and all other sorts of trickery to this technique. My blue green design is one of my best outcomes but I’m quite a fan of this neon design too.

Novelty nails

The majority of these nails were created for the OMD challenge so they took a long time! I can’t say I make a habit of painting starfish on my nails but I love this type of design for challenges because they really challenge creativity. Here are a few of my favourites…

That is all for today’s spontaneous post! I hope that I’ll persuade myself into painting my nails again soon, but I’d better not make any promises… 🙄

Thanks for reading!

Hello! I’ve had a little break from painting my nails for a few days since I was taking up a lot of my free time blogging and nail painting. Even though I loved every minute, I figured I should probably escape the nail polish fumes for a couple of days!

I’m back though with little time to spare before the OMD3 challenge is over 😦 I have loved this challenge once again and it’s really been a brilliant opportunity to connect with so many talented bloggers from across the globe and I’ve tried to push my creativity.

Today I will be showing you my nails for the theme ‘#mynailsandmybag’ which I’ve been looking forward to. Ah, shoes and handbags. This challenge has been so brilliant. I decided to create the print on this pretty bag which I got a few years ago as a gift which I believe was part of a Boots perfume deal. I really like the floraly print and the bold red background. Pretty 🙄 I’ll add an image of the print below…

I started by applying a red base coat by Rimmel London in the shade Double Decker Red and used my trusty Barry M nail art pen in white, to create random shapes like the ones on the bag.

Not my favourite design ever but it’ll be interesting to see what they look like in different colours perhaps!

Apologies for my thumb nail. The nail art pen decided to blob all of a sudden 😦 sad times.

As always, I finished off the design with a lovely coat of Seche Vite to add a nice shine although looking back, maybe these nails would rock a matte topcoat! I may just try that.