Aqua Leopard Nails for #NAILLINKUP

Week 2 of the March N.A.I.L. Linkup is AQUA.  I picked through my stash for the best aqua shades (ironically two of them had the word MINT in them.. go figure) and I came up with this cute leopard print.  I only tried leopard one time before, using water-based paints and only on 2 fingers, so hopefully this came out okay!

What I’m wearing:

base color ♥ wet n wild I Need a Refresh-Mint

blue sponged on tips ♥ NYC Skyline Blue

silver spots ♥ OPI Push and Shove

teal glitter ♥ Sinful Colors  Lush Life

black striper polish ♥ L.A. Colors Art Deco in black

I’m excited to wear my new OPI Push and Shove mirror polish!  I haven’t worn it on it’s own yet, and since I’ve been dying to try it, I decided to make my leopard spots with it!  To make my silver spots look even cooler I thought I’d add my Sinful Colors teal glitter in little blobs over top… but unfortunately the sinful formula wasn’t dense enough with glitter.  So I ended up lightly swiping the glitter over the entire nail instead.  Not really the look I was going for since I really only wanted it over the silver, but as I always say… it’s good to want things! Other than that little change in plans, the leopard print was pretty easy to do.  Now I wanna try it again!

I hope you like my first ‘real’ attempt at leopard print!  You can see the other aqua designs right here:

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

Spring Gleam mani from Julep

It’s day 8 and the theme of the 30 Day Nail Art Challenge is ZIG ZAG. That reminded me of an email I got from Julep last week about a simple zig zag spring tutorial.  When I saw it I made a mental note to try it out sometime.  Well that time is today!

I don’t own any Julep polishes so I had to improvise with what I had.  I used the following:

Sephora by OPI ♥ How Cute Is That?

NYC ♥ Skyline Blue

Revlon ♥ Charming

Here’s Julep’s version↓  If you want to see their simple tutorial you can click their image below…