Halloween nail art contest!

Posted in contest, Halloween, Nails, Ruffle by Craftynail

Julie from Short & Sweet in Texas is hosting a fb nail art contest for halloween! The contest goes til Oct 16th and the winner gets a $20 Born Pretty Store gift card! You should join in! Here’s all the info!

For this nail art I hand-painted spiders and webs on 4 fingers using a skinny nail art brush. On the other fingers I used the RUFFLE technique (see Chalkboard Nails’ dandy ruffle tutorial here) using the largest dotting tool I could find. Believe me, you’ll want to make big dots or you’ll be sitting there forever dotting and dotting until your mind slips away into halloween madness. I counted my little dots and there’s 164 dots on one hand. So 328 altogether! The last time I did ruffles I used a bigger dotting tool and it seemed to go much quicker, so save yourself the hassle and make BIG DOTS!

Here’s the 4 polishes I used for this halloween spider manicure:

Art Orange ♥ AVON

Liquid Leather ♥ China Glaze

Lickety-Split Lime ♥ Sally Hansen

I’m a Belieber ♥ Nicole by OPI

Make sure to vote for your fave on the Short & Sweet in Texas facebook page. The pic with the most LIKES wins the prize! Wish me luck in the contest!

1Apr2013

Patterned Native American Nails in Red

Posted in Challenge, Dotting, Nail Art, OPI, Ruffle by Craftynail

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!!!!

20Feb2013

Ruffle Nail Art

Posted in China Glaze, Dotting, Matte, Nail Art, Nails, OPI, Orly, Revlon, Ruffle, Tutorial, wet n wild by Craftynail

I’m so excited about this nail art technique called Ruffle Nails! Every nail fanatic needs to try this- it’s easy and has lots of wow factor. All you need to do is grab your favorite polish shades and a dotting tool (or bobby pins) to make some over-lapping rows of dots (it helps to use the largest tool you can find so the dots aren’t too small). If you’d like to see a step-by step tutorial here’s a great one by Chalkboard Nails. Now that I’ve discovered ruffles- I’ve got all these ideas swimming around in my head- neon ruffles, rainbow ruffles, black n white ruffles… I want to try them all!

My first attempt came out much so better than I expected! I casually worked on this design while sitting on the couch and I honestly didn’t try too hard. I figured I’d end up taking it off with polish remover and then give it a real go later. Well, I couldn’t believe how cute my test mani came out so I took some pics! I used some of my favorite green and purple polishes here… and I think the matte topcoat really pulled it together nicely. The variety of colors and the satin finish made my fingertips look like fimo clay! ↓

I went with a cool color combo of blue, pink and grey for my second design. ↓

One thing I like about the ruffle technique is that it’s so easy, you can even do a great job on your ‘other’ hand! I’m right-handed so my left hand nail art usually looks good, and my right-hand comes out how should I say… non-photogenic? LOL. Well, not with ruffles! Try it out for yourself and let me know your results!

♥ Mood struck polish as my base (teal)