Day 4.  Only one more mani to post for this challenge and two more days to go until Aussie Indie Con. I'm a little bummed though cause there is an 80% chance of rain for Saturday in Sydney and I was planning to spend the evening walking the city streets with the Hubby and kids checking out the last day of Vivid.  Looks like we will be putting on rain ponchos and heading out in the wet!

I tried something a little different with today's mani.  My inspiration was a sheet of Paper Towel. Infact I nearly did it with toilet paper and added a poop emoji, but I decided I'd keep it classy, or at least as classy as paper towel allows you to be.

I was aiming to create a waved textured look, and it was pretty much a success.  To achieve his look I painted three thickish coats of ulta3 lily white polish.  I then topped that off with Seche Vite quick dry.  After leaving it to dry for a while, the Seche Vite had dried well on the top layer, but the three layers of white polish beneath were still quite squishy.  I then used my pointiest dotting too to dent lots of tiny little holes into the polish in a wavy pattern. 

A little weird, yes, but I especially enjoy wearing textured designs like this because I tend to fiddle with them and run my fingers of the ripples.

Day 3 and today I attempted something new on my nails.  It's not often that I do actually find new designs or techniques that I haven't tried. Again I was going through the wrapping paper we got from Costco, and one of the patterns was a red and white quatrefoil design.

I remembered seeing some Instagram posts with some quick videos showing how to create the pattern using dotting tools. So I gave it a go.

I've gotta say that I'm not completely happy with this, as I feel the design is way too big. I should have used much smaller dotting tools to get the pattern much smaller.  I also found that you need to be bloody good at using a dotting tool, particularly relating to getting an even amount of polish on the tool to get equal size dots, and being able to place those dots in the right places.  It was pretty tricky!

I really want to try this again in another colour combo, probably black and white, with much smaller dots.

For day number 2, I have some gold foil nails inspired by some gold wrapping paper.  The wrapping paper is from a five roll pack that we recently purchased from Costco.  It is seriously the best wrapping paper I've ever used.  It's thick and has some sort of plasticy film over it so it doesn't tear. Plus each roll has two sides with different prints.

This gold paper is plain satin finish gold on one side and on the other side it is a mottled tarnish gold look with a super strong holo dotted finish.  It was such as surprise when we opened the roll to wrap a birthday present to find the amazing holo on the inside.

I happened to have a tiny little square of gold holo foil that was a perfect match for the paper, and thus this weeks gold foil nails were created. 

Now I've actually used this foil before, and I just did a blog search to find it.  Can you believe it was 7 years ago?!? Way back in May 2010 I did this post, which was one of the first times I'd ever used foils. I suffered a terrible fail that day as I learnt how most top coats ruin the effect of foils.  Having learnt from that experience, I ensured I topped this mani with a water based top coat.  I used FNUG Aquabase as my top coat.

Thank you so much everyone for you comments on my last blog post about my gorgeous girl Nahla. Now that I've had some time to mourn, combined with the week before her passing, I've actually got myself together ready with a whole bunch of new manis to share.

This week is another Digital Dozen week where I will have new nail art every day on the theme of Paper.  Then this Saturday I'm heading up to Sydney to attend Aussie Indie Con.  Apart from holding water marbling demos and workshops, I will be meeting so many other Australian nail polish and nail art enthusiasts, including meeting fellow Aussie Digital Dozen participant Tracy from Olivia Jade nails, plus the creators of all the Aussie brands.  I'm very excited to attend the event and cant wait to see what is in our VIP bags.  I'll try to do some live Instagram posts from the event.

OK, now lets get into day one!  Today I teamed up with some twin nails with Amanda from Lady Maid Nails.  This hilarious idea was all Amanda's. I know she got the idea from someone else, but I can't actually remember.  

I fre handed the unicorn and the flowing bits of mane and tail.  The enormous horn is the paper element of this mani.  I rolled a small triangle of paper up around my water marbling tool and painted it with clear polish. When that was dry I applied a coat of gold polish.  I think the horn is probably a little big, cause it sure stuck out a long way, and of course you wouldn't actually wear this design anywhere, but cause it was made of paper it didn't actually hurt when it banged into anything.

To by beautiful Nahla.

I miss you on my lap already. Every time we sat down, you were there.

I miss your gentle taps on my shoulder in the middle of the night, with you telling me you were there and wanted to go under the covers.

I miss your intense head butts where you would smash your forehead into mine saying 'I love you mum, I love you mum' every time you did.

I will cherish the 18 years we had together you beautiful, loving girl.  I especially cherish this last year we had, cause you almost left us this time last year. My broken foot was a blessing in disguise, because without it, I wouldn't have done all that sitting with my foot up cuddling you.

Thank you for your endless love, you have my endless love too.

Today I have a city-scape silhouette design that is a twin nails design with @nailsbynatalie_. You know I think this is actually the first ever twin nails I've actually done.  It was such a simple process. Natalie just DMed me in Instagram and asked if I wanted to do twin nails, and I was like 'yep, lets do it'. So anyone else out there that might like to do twin nails with me, just shoot me a DM!

For my sunset gradient I use Picture Polish mad magenta, coral reef and citrus.  I then stamped the black silhouette design on using the same plate that I used the other day for the butterfly wing design. Vivid Lacquer VL004.  I used different sections of the stamp on different parts of each nail so they all ended up looking different.  I like it a lot.

Day 5, yes I made it. I'm struggling to do 5 days in a row at the moment, how am I going to tackle the 31 Day Challenge in September? Perhaps I need to start doing manis now LOL!

Today I have a bunch of red poison arrow frogs.  I'm not really loving these. I wish I'd stamped the frogs in different colours, plus I was rushing and didn't get the alignment right on all of them! C'est la vie!

I really do love the little frogs though, which are from the Clear Jelly Stamper On the pond plate. The double layered stamping really highlights the frogs nicely.

A date late, but I'm here with day 4 of the rain forest inspired manis.  I needed a quick design that didn't need too much thought, so when I did a google image search for 'Rainforest Creatures' and saw photos popping up of the Morpho Butterfly, I knew I could pull it off in about an hour for the full mani.

I started with a gradient of Picture Polish blue, swagger and instinct.  I then planned to stamp over it with Vivid Lacquer plate VL004.  But my problem was that I had done my diagonal gradient the wrong direction for the butterfly wing design.  That meant I had to work out a quick way to mirror the image.  I knew I could do it with a stamping decal, but I didn't have time to apply 10 stamping decals, it would have been quicker to just redo the gradient on the other angle. 

What I ended up doing was pick up the image in the normal way, then quickly stamp it onto another clear stamper which reversed the image, and then stamped it onto my nail. I think I might actually do a video about it, because it worked out really well.