Day 12 of OMD Challenge- Warm Brown Dotticure

Hey nail fans!  Day 12 of the OMD  Rather Awesome Challenge is DOTS!  For me, dotting is one of the easiest designs to do.  And normally I don’t do a lot of dotticures because I feel like it’s cheating somehow.  I know that doesn’t make any sense at all…. but I guess I feel like they’re so simple I wonder if people will be like, “Come on Crafty, gimme something more original than that!”  That’s dumb, I know.

For today’s dotticure I wanted to go with a brown and pink combo.  I love those colors together- but after rifling through my stash I realized I have like NO browns!!  I have a few shimmery/metallic shades, some nudes and some that are kinda orangey…. but as far as regular old browns- I got nothing.   I feel an online shopping spree in my future!!!!!!!  So instead of brown and pink I dug into the dark recesses of my stash to find a few nice warm brownish colors.  Here’s what I’m wearing:

creamy yellow base color ♥ 2 coats of Zoya Jacqueline 🙂

putty colored dots ♥ OPI Don’t Pretzel My Buttons

brown shimmery dots ♥ Maybelline Ultimate Wear in Tarnished Taupe (this polish is as old as the hills!)

mauve dots ♥ Sally Hansen Teflon Tuff in Wood Violet Cream (another verrry old bottle)

All dots were applied with a large dotting tool from amazon.  What do you think?  And do you have a favorite brown?  I think I need some nice creamy brown shades so lemme know if you have any recommendations!  Thanks!

12. Dots :

OMD Rather Awesome Challenge: Day 2 Blue- Dotted Blue Frenchie

Welcome to day 2 of the Oh Mon Dieu! It’s the Rather Awesome 31 Day Challenge Giveaway!!  The theme of day 2 is BLUE. 😀

First off I’d like to sincerely thank everyone for all the birthday wishes yesterday!  I had such a great day and all your warm comments really helped make the day feel special for me.  So thank you!  Nail bloggers are some of the sweetest and most encouraging people I’ve ever met!  You all are great… thank you for being a part of my life!

 Now that all the mushiness is out of the way 😀 let’s get to my blue design!  I started with one thick coat of a baby blue cream called Take Me To Your Chateau by Color Club.  When that was dry I taped off my tips using painters tape and I applied some dark blue using AVON Forget-Me-Not Blue.  I slowly removed the tape and was pretty impressed with my light and dark blue french mani!  But why stop there?  I then embellished the design with a dotting tool to create more interest.  I really like the monochromatic effect of the two blues in this frenchie- it’s pretty simple but also fun and retro.  I hope you like it. 😀

 I’m geared up to see the other blue manis now!  I really get a kick out of checking the inlinkz for updates!  You can view them here:

 2. Blue :

Lime Green Retro Dots

I felt like something real funky today so I grabbed my Sally Hansen Insta-Dry in Lickety-Split Lime.  This polish has a retro feel- it kinda reminds me of the ugly wallpaper that was in my kitchen when I was a child!  I added some dots in Zoya Jacqueline (cream), AVON Inspire (yellow), and AVON Orange Creamsicle (orange).  Then I dotted some lime green over top of those dots for fun.  I like the effect of the double-dots.  My nails look like they’re right out of the 70’s!  I feel ready to attend a Tupperware party! lol

I used some Sally Hansen Diamond Flash Fast Dry Topcoat when I was done and I’m regretting it.  I haven’t used that quick-dry topper in a few months so I couldn’t really remember if it was any good or not.  UGH!  It ended up being goopy and bubbly.  Maybe I should add some Seche Restore because this topcoat is currently not one of my faves!  It also didn’t dry that fast because half an hour later I got a big smoosh on one of my nails.  Boo!

I may not post nail art for a couple days since I will be doing a review of my new NCLA Nail Wraps that were sent to me by Nail Polish Canada!  Yay!  I’ve never tried wraps before and I want to do an honest review where I show pics of the wraps after a few days wear.  Yippee!  I want to apply them right now but I really should get to work.  It’s monday afterall 😦

Til next time!

French Flowers

It’s the last day of the Nail Art Challenge.  Boohooie!  Before I joined the challenge I was thinking oh no.. will I be able to commit to 30 straight days of nail art!?  It sounded like so much work.  But now that the 30 days are up… I can’t believe how fast it went!  I was able to really immerse myself in nail art and I tried so many cool techniques that I’ve been wanting to try for so long! Julie picked some really cool themes and it was a blast.  One of my own favorite designs is probably my AriZona Iced Tea Nails.  AriZona recently posted it on their facebook page and my blog stats have blown up today!  Pretty cool I think. 🙂

Moving on to my very last mani from the challenge!  Day 30’s theme is RECREATE YOUR FAVORITE MANICURE.  I chose Brijit’s manicure to recreate:  Isn’t hers cute?  Brijit’s mani was in turn inspired by PSHIIIT.  Pshiiit made the cutest little GIF to show you how easy it is to paint these flowers: nail art fleuri.  I named my copycat of their manis FRENCH FLOWERS because both Brijit and Pshiiit are French bloggers!

My base color is Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Blue Me Away!  My petals are a light blue by NYC called Skyline Blue.  The silver accents were made with NYC Tribeca Silver.  I like the way it looks in real life- but so hard to photograph!

A final thank you for following me on this challenge!  I loved all the likes and comments- it really kept me going throughout the 30 days!  See you next time when poor Craftynail will have to come up with ideas on her own! lol

Water Marble with Clear Nail Polish!

We’ve made it to the halfway mark of Short And Sweet in Texas‘ nail art challenge!  Day 15 is all about water marble..if you don’t know what it is here’s a good youtube video by DearNatural62.    If you’ve ever water marbled before then you know how fun it is to pick out a bunch of cool colors for your swirly design!  But have you ever thrown a clear polish in the mix???  That’s what I’m experimenting with today- water marbling with clear polish!

I started by painting my nails with a cool combo of 3 neon colors.  It looked awesome so I took some pics which I may share on day 22/neon day of the challenge 🙂    Then I did the water marbling technique using only 2 polishes- clear and black.  So basically I dripped drops of black, then clear, black then clear, etc into the cup… and when I swirled it around with a toothpick I got this cool black design with clear ‘spaces’ in between.  The spaces allow the bright neon to show through from underneath.  Pretty neat!  Then I made a few polka dots using my black polish and a dotting tool just to spice it up (and fill in the gaps).

And in case you are wondering how clear polish works for marbling…. other bloggers have said that topcoat or clear polishes don’t spread well in the water.  I actually experienced the opposite- I found that my Sally Hansen Nail Shine Miracle actually spread better than all of my other pigmented polishes!  This is great news for me since I thought I hated my Nail Shine Miracle- I never use it as a topcoat since it bubbles and takes forever to dry.  But now that I know it works for marbling- it has a new purpose in my stash!

I like how bright this design is in real life- it’s kinda crazy lookin!  I went outside during sunset and my polish was so neon it nearly jumped right off of my fingers!  Too bad I didn’t get that cool ‘signature’ swirly marble design though- I wound up with these black and clear stripes instead.  No matter what I did I just couldn’t get my polish to drag properly with the toothpick.  So no swirls for this girl…. but my black and clear stripes still look cool!   Water marbling… why you so tricky?

Patterned Native American Nails in Red

I’m excited that today is day 1 of April Nail Art Challenge!

Julie from Short And Sweet In Texas organized this month-long nail painting extravaganza!

The theme of Day 1 is RED.  So here’s my red manicure:

I used four different red polishes and a dotting tool to make the native american pattern.  To avoid having the glossiness distract from the design I then topped it off with one coat of my MASH matte top coat.  This was pretty easy to do… but because of lighting I couldn’t get a good pic!  It’s one of those manis that looks better in real life … we’ve all had them before! lol  Here’s the red polishes I used-

OPI ♥ Grand Canyon Sunset

Zoya ♥ Carmen

Orly ♥ Naughty

AVON ♥ Ruby Slipper

If you are interested in joining the nail art challenge – it’s not too late!  Just paint your nails and post them online!  It will be fun!   Here’s the info.

VIEW THE OTHER SUBMISSIONS HERE!!!!

Four Leaf Clover Tutorial from Zoya

I can’t believe it’s almost St Patty’s Day!  This year is just flying by!  I was browsing the web for some cool shamrock nail art and came across a great little tutorial on the Zoya Blogspot blog.  I decided to use their technique but I couldn’t do just one four leaf clover – so I did a whole bunch for extra fun.

I used one of my new AVON polishes called Absinthe as my base color.  AVON must be a tad obsessed with absinthe because they also carry a Christian Lacroix perfume called Absinthe.  I wear the perfume from time to time and it smells really unique- sorta like an intoxicating tree smell, if that makes any sense.  Not sure why I love the idea of absinthe so much, probably because of one of my favorite movies- Moulin Rouge.  It has a really trippy scene where Ewan McGregor (LOVE) gets all weirded out on the stuff and hallucinates about fairies LOL.  Someday I should put some Konad fairy stamps on top of my absinthe polish just for you, Ewan ♥ !

Getting back to my St Patty’s nails…. for my four leaf clovers I used a small bottle from AVON called Nail Art Enamel in Styled Green.  This is how they market the product- “Create custom and detailed nail art with specially designed precision brush”.  YEAH RIGHT!  This product was so disappointing.  The brush was absolutely horrible.  All the bristles were different lengths and some funky ones stuck straight out to the side.  There’s no way I can use this brush to make detailed nail art, so I decided to at least make use of the green AVON polish with a dotting tool.  It worked well for the four leaf clovers because it was fairly opaque.

The tutorial I used for my four-leaf clovers can be found at the Zoya blog.  Just click Zoya’s image below to check it out!