Ah ha, I tricked you. You thought I was going to pull out some fancy freehand cartoon portraits for day 5, to match what I did for day 5 on the black prompt.  Well let me tell you that I do have a great idea for a mani that fits that exact description, but I haven't painted it yet, so instead you get this one from my draft vault.  I counts on the 'white' theme because it was done on a white base ok!

Today's mani was one of those that organically grew as I painted it. I started with some MILV water decals, which are the two centre nails. But I decided that I didn't want to just do a full mani of water decals and I needed to put some sort of artistic flare to it. So I then did a gradient using similar colours to the centre part of the water decals, as well as some of my own gold accents.

When looking at this, know one could tell that it was a combo of water decals and free hand nail art. 

It's a Digital Dozen week already and I have prepared precisely zero nail art manicures ready for this month's prompt, which is Indie Love.  However, the Indie Love theme throws me a lifeline, because I do happen to have a bunch of draft posts that I can post, which happen to use polishes from different indie brands. 

Today's mani is from a brand that doesn't really call themselves an indie brand, but I certainly classify them as an indie. That is because it's a brand that is created and run by just a few girls, not an organisation or corporation.  Even though the polishes are lab made, the creative input is absolutely from the creators (and those that create collaboration shades).

This mani features five Picture Polish shades that were all released in the latter part of last year.  The green is called dandelion, yellow is cozy, blue is clouds, mauve is tash and the pink is embrace.  

I wore this a while back, when the polish was first released. I was super excited because this polish is a collaboration with Margaret from Loves Lacquer, who I finally got to meet at Aussie Indie Con in June this year.

Haven is a slightly nude toned white crelly polish with a scattered holo finish. Margaret's inspiration for this was the white sandy Whitehaven Beach on the Whitsunday Islands. Australia truly has the best beaches in the world!

I kept my nail art simple for this polish, with some silver swarovski crystals and some silver stamping.

You know when you get a text message from someone, and you read it, and then you forget about. And I mean forget about it for several days or a a week. Then when you remember it's all weird and awkward about whether it's too late to reply. That's kind of how I feel about these swatch photos.

These swatch photos were again done last year. All just before I had my motorcycle accident. Which totally messed up my entire blogging schedule. I've seriously got to get on top of my draft blog posts. I currently have 18, and that's after I merged all these Picture Polish swatches into one post.  

So I'm just going to jump straight into swatches, cause these polishes have all be around for ages now. There are already plenty of swatches out there, but here are mine.

Merge - 2 coats with seche vite top coat shown in full sunlight.

Free - 2 coats with seche vite top coat shown under a lamp.

Orchid

Remember - 2 coats with seche vite top coat shown under a lamp

Rose - 2 coats with seche vite top coat shown in full sunlight.

Sisters - 2 coats with seche vite top coat shown in full sunlight.

Soul - 2 coats with seche vite top coat shown under a lamp.

Wunderlust - 2 coats with seche vite top coat shown in full sunlight.

Maybe now I can update my Picture Polish colour guide a bit, argh, but that means coding some stuff up and I just can't be bothered at the moment.

Only three days to go, we're almost there!  Today is flag day, and really it's probably the one prompt that I struggle with the most.  Every year I want to think of something a little different and quirky, rather than just doing a traditional country flag. 

This year I nearly did a rainbow flag, given they whole marriage equality vote thing, but I figured I'd done enough rainbow designs already this challenge.

So what did I end up with? This rather traditional flag pattern featuring red, green and blue.  This flag is apparently the flag of the planet Mars.  The red represents the red dirt, and the green and blue represent the future terra-forming of the planet, with green for plants material and blue for the water. Interesting huh!

I used two different brand scattered holos for this look. Macaron from Picture Polish, and inhale and night rangers from Dance Legend.

I always find this prompt so tricky. I find it really hard to find inspiration from a some, but today this one just clicked when I saw the dancing bodies on the Bundle Monster plate that I stamped on my ring and pinky fingers.

As soon as I saw them I though they looked like people dancing, and more specifically, like they were shaking. So my inspiration for this mani is the Taylor Swift song, Shake it off. 

My kids just love dancing away to this song. In fact, at school, they have replaced the school bell with a 10 second audio clip of either Shake it Off, or Happy by Pharrel Williams. 

So what's going on here on my nails, well I was inspired by the video clip for this song. There are lots of costumes and many distinct looks.  To start with I did a grey gradient background just like the background on the video clip.  I did the cassette deck player with red stamping to represent the part where she wears the black leather plants and the red bomber jacket.  The ballet shoe represents the part with the ballet dancers (obviously) and then there are the people dancing, or "shaking it off". I even painted on gold to represent her gold outfit. 

Half moons is a prompt that I either totally smash it, or completely miss the mark. Last year and 2014 were both years where I hit it out of the park, 2015 was pretty damn awful. This year I'm not so sure. I was inspired by a design I saw through google images, but it wasn't watermarked so I don' know who to credit. The one I saw was also matte, and maybe that is why it looks so much better than mine? I dunno. I don't hate this, but I'm not loving it either. Maybe it's because it's spring time here and I want to wear bright colours and pastels, not dark vampy colours like this mani.

What I do love is the sparkly bling feature nail.  I used some new crystals I got from MilvArt, there are regular silver ones and aurora borealis ones which are multicoloured pastel shades.

The other thing I love about this mani is the half moon shade, which is a new colour from Picture Polish called Macaron. It's impossible for me to capture it accurately in my indoor photos, so I have some swatch photos below.