The theme for this month's Digital Dozen is Whimsy.  Arrgh, I curse whoever came up with the Whimsy theme, it is impossible!  

I've done lots of things to get some inspiration for this week's manis. First I googled the actual definition of Whimsy - 'playfully quaint or fanciful behaviour or humour'.  What! How do I translate that to my nails.

Next up I did a google image search on the word Whimsy.  And there, as the second image on the google image result was this adorable watercolour picture, painted by Mimi Torchia. I was captivated by it and instantly knew what my first 'Whimsy' nail art design would be.  

This is free hand painted using polish, except for the dragonfly, which is stamped from a Messy Mansion plate.

This is going to be a tricky week!

So after so many people have dropped out from this year long challenge, I've decided to follow suit of a few other ladies, and drop the '40' from the blog title.  There hasn't been 40 manis for many weeks, so instead I'll just go with 'lots'.

This week's theme is Floral, and I've recreated a similar design that Sarah from Chalkboard nails created a few years back with Black-eyed Susan with fully centres.  Here in Australia we don't have Black-eyed Susans, as they are native to North America, but we do have lots of other varieties of daisy's and they all pretty much look the same right.

These were all painted freehand, which is probably quite evident.  But it is the sort of design that is achievable on both hands without having to resort to creating nail decals for you other hand.  My favourite part of these is most definitely the flocking powder 3D centres to these.

Argh, what is this with the 11.30pm quick blog post before bed.  Usually I do a blog post before I go paint my nails, but tonight I painted them first (and they took ages (and I don't like them very much)). I have a few edited photos of different manis to share, but they are needed me to do something extra, such as edit a video.

I just edited my video for these, and all up it took me 25 minutes to do all the trimming, editing, adjusting speed, adding watermarks etc to the video.  Who has time to do this!  I don't know how those girls with millions of follows manage to post nail art with tutorials every day!  They mustn't have demanding jobs or children!!

As the title suggests for this mani, I used some nail vinyls from What's Up nails for this look.  I started with a solid blue creme base, I used Pretty Serious Type 40.  I then applied the nail vinyls and used three of the blue holos from the China Glaze Hologlam collection to create a soft holo gradient.

I've used the What's up nai vinyls before and they are good quality.  They are easy to peel away from the backing paper without having to push out every hole cause the cuts are precise. They also last well when you have thin sections of vinyl (like between these drops) and then apply lots of polish on top. They don't melt and stay strong for a good peel off.

It's been ages since I played with some of my gel polishes to create something a little 3D.  I think the last thing I did was the white gel design of the face and hands for the Supernatural prompt of the 31 Day Challenge last yet.

Anywho, I spotted a shell design using gel polish somewhere, and I thought I would try my hand at that.  To give it a mermaid-ish feeling, I didn't a simple blue and pink gradient using Face of Australia Calypso Bay frosted polishes.  I then applied top coat and dipped each nail into some pink iridescent glitter.  Even with top coat applied, it was a very textured finish and super sparkly, but holy sh1t did I get glitter everywhere!

For the shell nail, I just just white gel polish to build up some ridges. I added a gold star fish charm from the Born Pretty store at the top of the nail.

In my last set of products from the Born Pretty Store, I chose some Peacock design nail foils.  The package comes with a really long roll of the foil, so there is no worries about ensure you have enough for all your nails.  There were some beautiful pictures on the Born Pretty site that showed this foil over pastel shades and natural nails, so I thought I would try it over two darker shades.

What I didn't realise was that these foils have a full holographic sheen over the entire foil.  This reflects light beautifully, but when worn over darker polish it looks rather grey and dull in lower light situations.

I painted two nails with Picture Polish Midnite Meteor and two with Hercynia and the design looked pretty over both, although I think my preference was over Midnite Meteor. 

I also stepped away from my usual go to top coat for nail foils (Picture Polish Revolution) because I was feeling lazy and there was something else in front of me that I thought I would try. Born Pretty store Mirror polish top coat.  The one and same that I used as a base coat for the mirror polish here.  It worked great, although dry time is an eternity! It doesn't wrinkle up the foil and then you can apply a regular top coat over it.

Another week, another mani for the 40 Great nail Art Ideas challenge.  Although I have to say it's sad how many of the original participants have dropped out.  Last week's inlinkz only had 22 manis, a far cry from the 50+ manis in the first few weeks of the challenge. 

This week's theme is three shades of red/orange and my individual prompt was squares.  This was a hard one for me and my end mani is a bit meh!  And for a mani that I felt a bit meh about, let me tell you that this took bloody ages to do!

Because I wanted really neat little squares, I painted my polish out onto my Uber Matt and then cut up the squares of polish with scissors.  After i had stuck them to my nails I didn't like that the side edges weren't perfect, so I added the red lines, and then I didn't like them.

I have heaps of manis to share, but only a few words. I think I have been staying up to late at night playing with polish, then catching up on facebook groups and browsing through instagram.  How's a girl to keep up!!

Today's mani is a super simple one. I originally swatched Picture Polish gala, but decided it was too pretty to take off and I needed to wear it as a full mani.  So I just added some silver Swarovski crystals and left it at that.

What's up nails recently sent me a little package with a selection of their nail vinyls to try out.  The first one that really caught my eye was this Hypnose design with a a crazy jaggered edge swirls.

I thought the design of the vinyl really lent itself to a couple of circular gradients - similar to a previous design I here with aqua shades, but this time I chose contrasting warm and cool colours to really make it pop!

The vinyls are a nice quality and worked wonderfully for this design. They stuck down securely and mostly gave really clean and sharp edges, especially considering that I first sponged on some white before doing the blue gradient. I only had one or two spots where the colour leaked underneath.