I have a quick mani for you tonight for last weeks prompt of the 26 Great Nail Art Ideas challenge. I wanted to get this up tonight before another week of Digital Dozen starts tomorrow.

The prompt was Dry or Drag marble and I'm super pleased with how this on the nail drag marble turned out.  I used some polishes from the old and the new pastel pet name polishes from Pretty Serious.  

Hey there, look, it's a new blog post.  It turns out I can still do them!  I have to say that my la-z-boy recliner is getting way too much love from my round butt each evening, instead of me sitting here and writing up interesting blog posts about nail art.

Last Friday's prompt for the 26 Great Nail art ideas was Creatures with Scales. As per usual, I completely forgot about the prompts until I started to see the other girls manis pop up in my feed. Then of course I wanted to paint my nails.  So I did.

I took the interpretation very literally and did scales, in the mermaid kind.  These are actually water decals that I got from the Born Pretty store.  I actually thought they would be like most water decals and require a white base and the film would be transparent with the greens, blues and purples. Because of this I painted my nails with a very metallic silver polish with a hope of that shimmery shininess showing through. But it turns out that these decals are total opaque, so my silver base only showed through on the edges where the decals where slightly too narrow.

I added little stones, shells and star fish charms and caviar beads, also from the Born Pretty store.

I'm a little bit late with my fifth Digital Dozen mani this week, but what I did manage to do was combine it with the 26 Great Nail Art Ideas Challenge prompt of 'Things that are round.

For the Digital Dozen, I'm showing some inide love to Emily de Molly. I have a massive collection of Emily de Molly polishes they are all such amazing colours.  This one is a few years old, infact it was released in December 2015 (I can't believe it was that long ago).  I know I swatched it at the time, but I don't recall wearing it as a full mani. The colour is called Empty Journal, and it's a rich shimmery blue with purple duochrome.  It applies beautifully and has such a wonderful metallic finish. 

For the 26 Great Nail Art Ideas Challenge, I pulled out these Emoji water decals.  I don't even remember where i purchased them from.  I think it was from the Born Pretty Store, and if it was, it was ages ago so I don't expect them to still have them for sale.  What I loved about these decals is that they were a solid colour. I thought I was going to have to apply a white polish coat behind them, but nope. This means you can wear them over any colour, not just a white mani. And in my opinion, they look pretty amazing over blue!

It's been a while since I did a mani for the 26 Great Nail Art Ideas challenge. But after seeing the other participants post their manis last Friday, I was inspired to paint my nails.  I haven't done a French design in absolutely ages, so the prompt of French with a twist actually really piqued my interest. Which is funny, cause I usually consider French manicures to be generally pretty boring.

I did a chrome base over a nude shade, and then top coated that with a water based top coat. I then masked off a rough french tip using liquid latex and quickly painted on the rainbow stripes. To finish it off I tried to do a thin black french tip line. It didn't end up looking so thin here in these photos, but in real life it looks pretty good. 

Has it really be two weeks since I last posted? Well yes, apparently it has. Life has been busy with the usual stuff. Kids back to school for a new year, the Weetbix TRYathalon, school swimming carnivals, squad swimming, weekend tennis, you know the usual stuff that rolls on week after week.

This fortnights prompt for the 26 Great nail art ideas is 'love, but no pink or red'.  I've got to say, these too a while to paint, about two hours for all 10 fingers, so it's just lucky that the Dance Legend Bi top coat is still working awesome for me, so I got a full week out of these.

I painted a different combo gradient on every nail using five of the Pipe Dream polish A Night in Vegas Cremes. I then did reverse stamping on five different stamper heads at a time, with the same five shades I used for the gradient.  Now I know that the polish looks a little pink on my ring and pinky fingers, but they truely are purple and orange shades.

I finally remembered to paint my nails with one of the prompt themes for the 26 Great Nail Art Ideas Challenge, before I saw other participants nails and though, oh that's right that was a cool theme that I wanted to participate in.  The prompt this fortnight is neon and black, which in my opinion is one of the best combos every.  Sadly it's also one of the most difficult combos to photograph ever too.

You wouldn't believe it, but I did in fact use three neon shades for that gradient. In real life the middle neon orange shade is so bright, but in these photos it just looks like a little bit of pink and lots of yellow. I pulled out a bunch of older Orly neon shades for this, they really have some good ones and it was nice to grab something I hadn't worn in ages.

I used a new stamping plate too. This butterfly image is from Kelly Negri Plate KN28, which I got from DRK nails. Their store is closed at the moment, but I'll leave the link here as it will work when they open up again.  I love this image on the plate, with all the small butterflies leaving the negative space of the larger butterfly. 

Happy New Year.  2018...can you believe it!  Here is my first mani of the year, and I've actually remembered ahead of time to complete a prompt for the 26 Great Nail Art ideas challenge.  The prompt is Metallic with one colour. I was going to burnish chrome powders into my nails, but in the end I decided to pull our my  Born Pretty Store Mirror Polish, because since we got the chrome powders, the polish doesn't get any love anymore.

I also chose to stamp with a colour that I would usually never choose. Orange.  I really wanted to go with green or blue, because generally I prefer cool toned shades, but I forced myself to step out of my usual comfort zone and got with this. 

The stamping image is from plate KN-27, which I got from DRK nails.  It's actually a slightly curved zigzag patter, bt I like how it looks like something you would create with nail vinyls.

Around this time last year was when I shared the last mani I created for the 26 Great Nail Art Ideas Challenge. Then I had my motorcycle accident and didn't end up rejoining the challenge again.  This year I'm back in, and we have only just started. If you like to paint nail art and want to join in the challenge, then please come join the facebook group to get all the details. All nail artists are welcome to participate and the rules aren't too strict, it's ok to miss weeks if you are too busy and we only post one mani every two weeks.

The prompt is Halloween with negative space.  Negative space can be tricky, especially if you have stained nails, which is why you will usually find that I do the negative part towards the back part of my nail. 

I just free hand painted on random shapes using the three classic Halloween shades of green, purple and orange. I then just painted the black like to make the patchwork appearance.

Oops, it's been nearly a week since I was last here.  

Latest on my foot and ankle, just because I know you are really so interested in my health and well being LOL!  I had the CT scan on Monday and it was good news.  Nothing was displaced so I didn't need any surgery.  However, as I suspected it did show lots of other broken bones that were crushed.  I have one broken toe, two broken metatarsals, a broken cuboid, all the of the cuniforms are broken and the tip off the medial malleolus of my tibia is broken, so 8 breaks in total.  I'm also heading back to work on Monday.  I'm looking forward to being back as I feel like I lost touch with the place a bit, but I know I'm going to be pretty tired at the end of the day as I've been doing a lot of sitting around as well as little naps during the afternoon.  It will be an interesting week.  

Onto today's nail art, and I'm so happy with how this one turned out.  The prompt for the 26 Great Nail Art Ideas challenge this week is winter warmth, which in it's self is difficult for me, given that we just had a run of 30+ days and it's still a few days from summer here. You really can't beat Australian weather, it really is the best place in the world to live!

For my winter warmth nails I created a brick fireplace, and decided to Chrismassy it up a bit by adding a garland along the top.  I love how this turned out.  I feel like I could just toast some marshmallows right here on my nails!

Woo hoo, two days, and two blog posts. I'm on a roll. 

Today's prompt for the 26 Great Nail Art Ideas challenge is Black Base. I'm not a huge fan of black bases, except perhaps in the depths of winter, but when you join in nail art challenges coordinated by lovely girls in the Northern Hemisphere, you usually end up with mis matched seasonal prompts. 

For the prompt I did a drag marble. It's ok, but not exactly up to the standard that I was hoping. I created this look using gel polishes, because you can take all the time in the world doing the drags knowing that the polish won't try until you cure it. I also used a peel off base under the gel polish so I could easily remove it, but I found that one of my nails must have got some acetone into the base when I was doing clean up, and it did some wrinkly business. I just made sure it had a thick layer of top,coat and it was all good.

I like the fractal appearance this has, but not the gel thickness, or the blackness.

Yeah - you read that right, this is a Halloween nails post!  This broken leg has really set me back as far as blogging goes and it's a real struggle to get to the PC to write up blog posts, both physically and mentally.  But I'm here now, so I might try get a few written up and scheduled!

I'm pushing myself to post this mani, because it's a full two weeks late, given that is was the prompt form the 26 Great Nail Art Ideas challenge of "Halloween in the wrong colours" that should have been posted two weeks ago.  I actually didn't do any Halloween nails this year (with the exception of these). Halloween just isn't a big thing where I live.  

That said, I totally loved these nails.  Probably because they didn't feel halloweeny at all!  I created a gradient using Picture Polish wanderlust and orchid and then did double stamping with a spiderweb design using blue and white polishes from Mundo de Unas.

Today begins another year long challenge, but this time it isn't quite so intense with a mani every week, this time it's only a mani every fortnight, so two mani's a month is quite a breeze really.  There are also a few more girls participating, so hopefully there will be a few more inlinkz added than what was happening with the last challenge.

The first prompt is simply Silver and Blue, which means you can interpret it in any way you want. I created a mirror chrome silver base using Dance Legend white peel off base and then rubbed in chrome power.  I then did some gradient stamping in shades of blue.  I finished it off with a coat of water based top coat, specifically, Picture Polish Revolution.