I’ve done a bunch of valentines nails so far this year, but I had to squeeze in another for our February Nail Art Ideas Linkup (more info on N.A.I.L. right here)! To make it sexy for the holiday I wanted to incorporate some red, a thermal heat-activated polish, and some hearts! The two main polishes I used here are Nicole by OPI Challenge Red-y and Black Sheep Lacquer Enter Sandman. I also did a white accent nail with a red heart outlined with black dots. The black dots make it look like a digital 8-bit heart! I really like it!

thermal hearts by craftynail

The thermal polish that I used over all the red nails, even over the white ones, is a translucent light grey color called Enter Sandman. It’s a thermal topper by Black Sheep Lacquer which is supposed to transform your base color and give it a black thermal effect. I didn’t get too much thermal effect in my pics though, sorry. It’s been so cold here in NY (huge snow storm in effect as I write this)! However, I did notice more thermal action during my kickboxing class yesterday when I was nice n warm (that’s a nice way of saying ‘dripping with sweat’)! I love the vampiness of this color combo. The red Nicole by OPI polish with the indie thermal on top looks really hot! Even the thermal over the white looks kinda cool! It has a grey faded newspaper look.

If you wanna see the other valentines manis for the N.A.I.L. Linkup then here are the links. They’re open for the whole month of feb if you’d like to enter your nails too…

FEBRUARY 2014

Red :

Valentines Day :

Gradient :

Glitter :

I can’t believe we are half-way through the July Nail Art Challenge! It’s a lot of work to consistently put out original nail art designs every day- but so worth it, right? Day 15 is all about HEARTS and I have a cute purple design for you today!

I started with two coats of Butter London Scoundrel which is a nice dusky purple. A few of my nails I topped with two coats of an OPI glitter called Lights of Emerald City. Since that OPI glitter is white I decided to make some white hearts on my other nails to pull the design together. FOR THE HEARTS: I started with my Sally Hansen Nail Art Pen in black. I am loving this pen and just ordered two silver ones (do I see a giveaway in Crafty’s future? Yes, yes I do!) I drew the hearts on with the black pen and then dotted inside the hearts with NYC white nail polish. Since I used my skinniest/smallest dotting tool it was easy to position the white inside the black heart shapes. I like the way that they have a nice black outline around them now.

Do any of you guys have a white textured polish, like maybe OPI Solitaire? If you use that to fill in the black heart outline then I bet they’d look like cute little PUFFY HEARTS! Wish I had a white textured polish like that!