My polish is lasting pretty good. It’s the polish I have on from the previous post. Today makes it 6 days. My nails have grown pretty long, so it was tempting to take my polish off and just re-polishing it with the same color. But I want to see how long this color will stay on. I’m sure it’s going to last longer now that I applied another coat of topcoat. That’s a tip, if your polish is applied correctly (from yourself or from a manicurist/nail tech) apply another coat of topcoat a few days later; it’ll make the color stay on longer and give your nails a boost of shine again.
(The picture above is the same polish as the picture below. It’s just different lighting).

I decided to bling up my nails by adding glitter. Lately I’ve been loving glitter on nails. Not on the entire nails though.
Here is just applied glitter to the corners on a diagonal. You know those glitter polishes you can get that have small flecks and big flecks of glitter…sometimes the big flecks are different shapes like hearts, stars, flowers, etc? I used one of those.
I just polished the path that I wanted first, then fished out the bigger flecks and dabbed it on.
Then I took craft paint, and added some light blue & black dots.
Then I painted on a few strokes of silver glitter polish.
Then added some curvy strokes of gold and dark blue glitter.
Add some gray dots following one of the gold strokes.
Finished with topcoat.
Yes, it’s going to be a bitch to take off, but that’s where I have pure acetone polish remover for.

Oh yeah, I think I jinxed myself. A friend asked if my nails were pretty much killed by all the pure acetone I’ve been using because I change my polish so much (everyday almost). I said “no” at the time. After a few weeks off wearing all the colors in the rainbow, my nails were getting weak. I switched to a non-acetone polish remover. It’s alot less harsh than straight up pure acetone. From now on, I’m just using the pure stuff for when I have to take glitters and glittered nail polishes off. Yeah, pure acetone is soooo much faster and easier to take any polish off, but it can really do some damage to your natural nails.
I also keep my polish on longer now.

In case if you were wondering, whenever I take my polish off to put on another, I don’t buff them nails. If I did that every time, my nails would be so thinned out and break off. I only buff them at the most, once a month. I have ridges on my nails, so when I do buff, I just buff the regrowth. So keep in mind, don’t buff too much on your natural nails, it thins them every time.

Products I used»
Seche Vite Crystal Clear Base Coat.
Sally Hansen Salon Complete in Commander in Chic
N.Y.C. Long-Wearing Nail Enamel in 105A: Starry Silver Glitter
Sally Hansen Salon Nail Lacquer in Shooting Star
Striping paint in a shimmery gold & a dark blue glitter
folkArt acrylic paint in:
524 Calypso Sky
938 Licorice
2561 Steel Gray
Seche Vite Dry Fast Topcoat

Acrylic craft paint is great for making designs. I got mine at Walmart in the craft/scrapbook section. They’re like a dollar each. You get a lot more product from these than you do with striping paint. And also, they’re water-based, so if you mess up, just wipe it off with a damp paper towel instead of having to take the polish off. ^^ I’ll think of more designs to do with just the craft paint later.

I thought drawing feathers on nails would be hard, but it’s actually quite easy. You’re simply drawing a stem with short strokes pointing in the same direction. The strokes towards the tip of the feather is a bit longer than the strokes towards the base. Practice with pencil and paper first. =)
My nails were at their longest when I did this design. Crazy long for me. I could draw the full feathers on shorter nails, but the details won’t really show. So the “partial feathers” are for the short nails. There suppose to be the tips of feathers. From far away, the partial feathered design looks better. I still like the full feathers though.

Inspiration: I love feathers and it didn’t come to mind ’til a friend requested it. =) Hope this is what you meant when you said feathers…lol. People have different meanings for feathers/feathering when it comes to nail designs.

All pictures: click to enlarge

Products»
Essie in Au Natural
Striping paint in light blue, silver, white, and black

Hope you guys liked it! ^^

I love nautical stars. People get tattoos of it for the meaning of it, but I just simply like the design of it. Well, I guess, I look at it as a rocker thing. Either way…it’s a cool design for tattoos and your nails! Lol.

Besides flowers & feathering/lining/stroking, this design was the most requested at the last nail salon I worked at. I myself love this design. This one will probably be one of the harder designs of mine because you have to be able to draw a little. Other designs of mine are real easy because you’re just layering strokes on and adding dots.
So for this, you just need striping paint. Make sure the paint/polish in the bottle is the right consistency. The polish should be thin, not runny…pretty much how it is when you first purchase it. My bottle was on the thicker side, but I didn’t have any polish thinner to thin it out. I fixed that problem though. You can get polish thinner at beauty supply stores, probably Sally’s.

So here are the steps of drawing a nautical star. If you can’t draw it on paper, then it will be hard for you to draw it on a nail. Lol. Practice drawing this on paper first.

This drawing is pretty self-explanatory.
Polish two coats of your choice of polish, wait to dry a few minutes, then draw.
I did this design a lot with the colors I chose: purple polish with a white/silver star. I did it a few times with a chalky pink polish (Essie Figi) with a black star. Sometimes I would go over the drawing part only with glitter.

Since my polish was thick, I colored in the “negative space” with a color that wouldn’t be so noticeable. This makes it look cleaner and sharper. I used black because in natural light, you can’t see it. If you have striping paint that matches your nail color, use that.

Two stars are never going to be exact since you’re hand drawing this. I only rock one star when doing this on myself. =/ Can’t draw this one on the other like I can with my other designs.

I loved putting this star on the index fingers or thumbs. This is my friend, Ashley that came to me all the time for my designs. ^^ Miss ya, girl. Opera singer that moved to NYC. CRAZY voice! Younger than me too.

Anyways…hope you guys like it!

This is how a lot of nail techs/manicurist put flowers on clients. Most of the time, they’ll just do step 1, put a dot in the middle, and a few strokes of color to represent leaves. I usually did Step 1 flowers for kids. For teens & adults, I would get fancier with it.
So here is a tutorial of how I polished on flowers for past clients.
Click pictures to enlarge.


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One coat base coat. Two coats of China Glaze in Audrey.

Dot some white polish on paper. The tools I used are dotters and striping paint [not shown]. If you don’t have dotters, you can use a pointy toothpick, the ball of a ball point pen, cotton swab [cotton removed, use for bigger flowers], and whatever you can find that resembles these dotters.

With a big dotter, dot on your petals [big dotter]. Five dots look the best. Drag petals in and drag them out [pointy dotter].

Add strokes of color on centers of petals [striping paint]. Add five small black dots [pointy dotter].

More strokes of color.

This is flower is on my nails now. The other design looks better on longer nails or on the big toe.

Easy right? If you have a hard time, practice on some paper to get your dotting right.

Products Used»
Seche Vite Crystal Clear Base Coat
OPI in Audrey
Striping paint: pink, silver, silver glitter, black, shimmery gold. On my nails now: orange-y peach, yellow, green, and blue glitter.
Sally Hansen Maximum Growth Plus in Pure White Tip
Seche Vite Dry Fast Topcoat.

^-^

This has got to be my most favorite and EASIEST look I’ve done. I wore a purple version of this look on Monday [refer back to "FirstDay" post]. Seriously, I love love LOVE this look. From far away it looks like a bad paint job, but when you look closely, it’s beauty. It’s like a painting on a canvas. ^-^ So here’s a tutorial on Abstract Nails.
Inspiration: paintings I’ve seen before. Reminder of that inspiration: a skirt I got from Urban Outfitters. I love this skirt. I don’t have a picture of it right now, but it’s one of those ones you sit high on your waist. The skirt is made by Kimchi Blue, one of my favorite brands sold at UO.

One coat base coat. Two thin coats of color.

Add a stroke of two or three different colors randomly. Express yourself. It’s art!
Lol. Or just copy what I did here. =P

I layered a few shimmery polishes. [I always put shimmer/glitter on my designs]
Now, choose a color that’s matte and totally opposite in shade than your base. Here I chose a bright pinkish, red for my base. So for this step, I chose a matte navy blue so it really stands out. If your base color is really dark, almost black, then I would use a matte & opaque color for this step…like white or pastels.
When you pull your brush out of your bottle, make sure you wiped off pretty much all the polish off. Then paint your nails with dry strokes. You want those “stroke” lines to show. Then you can go back and grab more polish to add a few wet strokes.

Finish with topcoat. ^-^

Products»
Essie Wife Goes On
Orly Lola
OPI Banana Bandanna
China Glaze Beauty & the Beach
Sally Hansen Salon Shooting Star
Essie Midnight Cami

Enjoy!