After my recent water marbling success with my own custom formula polishes, I was feeling pretty confident about my water marbling skills.  Confident enough in fact, to try out another brand again to see how I would go.  

Having recently bought the Sally Hansen Color Foils, I knew they were the perfect finish for the Metallic theme on the 31DC2014, and I wondered how well they would marble, it turns out they marble beautifully.  

I used four colours from the Color foils collection, Titanium Flush (pink), Purple Alloy (purple), Cobalt Chrome (blue) and Stirling Silver (silver).  For some reason the pink shade spread in the water much further than the other colours and that is why the mani has larger pink sections, however I still love the final look - they were colourful, swirly and very metallic.

So now I'm starting to get a real big head about my water marbling skills - lets just hope I don't screw it up for the actual water marble prompt coming up!

Something about the black and white prompt always draws me to do black and white stamping.  After doing various more complex designs, I feel like it's a nice easy break to just do some simple stamping. I was pretty excited for this black and white stamping because I had just received my order of stamping plates from My Online Shop. 

I used various designs from JR-4 and JR-8 plates. I just love these images, as they are all optical illusions, and the images are all really large so they cover my nails easily.  My favourite design in the one on my middle finger, even though I didn't quite get it centered. The design on my ring finger is pretty cool too.

Who else is loving doing the 31 Day Challenge?  I know I am.  Doing nail art every day is nothing special for me, I basically do that every single day anyway!  But what I'm loving is having the theme to work to and also seeing everyone's mani's inspired by that same theme.  The 31 Day Challenge really brings about a sense of community in the nail polish world.

Onto today's theme - Violet.  This is one of those mani's that looks much better at a distance than up close, but of course I have the up close photos to show you.  I wasn't sure that these even looked like what I had planned until Miss Three spotted my nails and said "Ooooooohhhh Mummy, Purple Fire". If she could tell what it was, then I knew it looked ok.

I used the same technique for this drag marble as I did for my pastel fire with unicorn mani a week or two back. I know that I promised a tutorial, but I'm still working on it!  

I used Picture Polish Violet Femme as the base, then dragged with Ulta3 Palette Play and Lilac Bloom.  Some nails worked out better than others, and like I said, this looked much better at a distance, which is good, because most people actually look at your nails from a distance, not at the enlarged giant fingers we look in blog photos.

You can also just see the last midi ring I got from Astrid & Miyu. This one is the gold crystal floating heart ring and it is so adorable, all their rings come in gold, silver or rose gold too.  It looks like a little crown or tiara on your finger.

I'm so pleased with how this mani came out! For once, it looks exactly like I had imagined it in my head!

For my blue theme, I wanted to get a watery look, so I created a simple blue gradient to start with.  I used Ulta3 Spring Shower, Block Out and Pacific Splash for the three blue shades.

On top of my gradient I did a thin water marble using clear polish and white polish.  I absolutely love the mix of very, very thin lines and slightly larger lines, all in wavy patterns.

To finish it off, I added a seahorse hex nail charm. 

I have lots of greens in my collection, and this one wasn't at the top of my list when I was thinking about a design to paint. But it just so happened that they day I was due to paint my green nails my stamping plate order from My Online Shop arrived.  One of the plates I got was MJ XXV, and it has a range of full nail designs as well as some single images that are perfect for advanced stamping or decals.  

When I spotted the little Mike Wazowski image, I knew what I was going to paint for the green prompt, and I knew exactly which polish would be my green base - Dance Legend Wazowski.

I created the little green monster with the advanced stamping technique, the only thing is that the stamp doesn't have any arms or legs.  Luckily, Waz doesn't have very difficult limbs to paint, so it was easy to add them in later.  I also added some stamping with the MU logo on my ring finger, and my thumb had the full Monsters University logo on it.  

To pull the final design together as a proper mani, I added some royal blue Swarovski crystals, which pulled in both the blue logo and the blue duochrome finish to the polish.

Mmmmm delicious hot buttered corn.  My yellow nails for day three of the challenge were actually really simple to create, but they looked very effective.

I used OPI I Can't Cope-a-cabana as my yellow base.  I then did some stamping decals using the Messy Mansion MM23 with the corn design on it.  For my brown stamping polish I mixed some Mundo de Unas Reddish and Green together (MdU mixes so well to make other colours!).  I then added light and dark yellow highlight and shadow dots to each corn kernel before sticking the stamp down onto my nails.  I used the same technique as I showed in this post.

Thanks to everyone using the inLinkz, it makes is so easy to visits everyone's blog posts.  I'm trying to get to all of them, and to comment, but it's hard to keep up with everyone's amazing work!

For day two of the 31DC2014 I actually pulled out my nail art brushes and did some free hand nail art.  Hopefully it's obvious that this little guy is Nemo.  I was inspired my a photo I spotted through google images that belongs to Juliatmll.

This was actually a really simple design to do, you just need a somewhat steady hand to do the black lines and the trickiest part is doing the circle around Nemo's face.  I really wish I have remembered to photograph my right hand to show you, because I did attempt this design as a full mani on both hands.  The right hand definitely looked like Nemo's poor unfortunate ugly friend or relative!

At least my kids instantly recognized the design on my nails, and then they started pestering me about wanting to watch the movie right then and there!

I used Face of Australia Some Like It Hot which is a nice and smooth bright orange creme.  The black and white designs are all painted with nail polish.

And so it begins, the 31 Day Challenge for 2014.

This year I'm starting really simple.  Actually I had planned to start with something amazingly awesome, but it was a complete sucky failure.  I attempted the design I wanted to do a total of four times, but when it didn't work after that I gave up - and I don't give up easily!  I'm not going to tell you what I was planning, just in case one day I succeed!  

So after my nail fails I went back to something I knew I could achieve quickly on both hands.  I looked through my red polishes and I saw my swatch stick of Ozotic 518.  This is definitely one of my most red holos and the holo flame is just spectacular!

I didn't want to cover it up too much, so I decided to do very simple stamping from MoYou London Suki 02 plate.  I stamped using Mundo de Unas black polish for the dragon, and a mix of yellow and reddish for the flame.  This will probably be the quickest nail art I will do for the challenge, as I was finished with this whole thing in less then 30 minutes.