31 Day Challenge 2014: Day 10 - Gradient

I have wanted to do one of these silhouette manis for a while now, so have done it for the gradient day of the challenge :)

As I always do before making a gradient I painted a coat of W7's White polish on top of my base coat.

For this gradient I wanted to create a sunset look. So from left to right the colours I used were China Glaze's Heli-Yum, China Glaze's Life Preserver and Sally Hansen Insta-Dri's Man-go Team! I sponged the colours on with the pink being at the cuticle of my nail and the yellow being at the tip.

For the stamping I used Konad's Black and MoYou's Mother Nature Collection plate 08. I used the grass in the right bottom corner and put this on the tip of every nail. On my thumb I stamped the smaller giraffe and a couple of the birds. On my index finger I stamped a tree and I then stamped the remainder of the tree onto my middle finger. Also on my middle finger I stamped half of the lion and then stamped the rest of the lion on my ring finger. On my little finger I just stamped some more of the birds.

I then applied Seche Vite's top coat and that is the mani finished. Love how these have turned out! Will definitely do these kind of mani's more often now.

As always thank you for visiting and if you have any questions or anything to say then please comment below :)

Sexy Leopard ;)

So this weeks challenge on the Nail Polish Queens google community is Sexy Seductress, and this is my take on that challenge and how I did it :)

To me Leopard print is very sexy and I think the bright pink and glitter complement it well, so I hope you like it!

Firstly I applied my usual basecoat and then I painted two coats of MUA Shade 19, a lovely pale beige.

Normally I would post two pictures, one with and one without flash but, from now on I am going to just post one picture. I have messed about with my camera settings and made sure that the picture looks as close to how the polish looks to me in real life on each picture.

Once the colour was dry I then used Konad plate m57 along with Konad black special polish to stamp the leopard print pattern. I think this plate has had the most used out of all my stamping plates. So if you have not yet tried stamping I recommend buying this plate to test it as then you will definitely be buying more :P

I then used Avon Vintage Boutique and a dotting tool to randomly fill in some of the spaces in the leopard print pattern.

I did all of the leopard print pattern yesterday and didn't finish what I wanted to do as I went to see Thor instead, which by the way is very good :)

So then today when I came to finish my mani of course I had been thinking of ways I could do it differently so I ended up removing the leopard print from my middle finger. Instead I painted two coats of Barry M Majesty, this is from the royal textured glitter collection. I have the whole set so if you want to see swatches then click here!

Then on my thumb and ring fingers I used a normal piece of sticky tape and applied it diagonally along the top part of my nail. I did this the day after so my polish was perfectly dry, but of course if you are doing this all at once you should wait until it is as dry as possible, nail drying spray will help. Once the tape was on I then applied as thick a coat as possible of China Glaze Heli-Yum and removed the tape, do this quickly as the polish will start to go tacky and then your line won't be as straight. If there are some bits where you can still see what is underneath then you can carefully paint a little polish over them like I did.

With this mani it wouldn't matter too much if the line isn't completely straight but I prefer to do this so that I get all the nails to look the same. Along the line I again used Barry M Majesty along with a dotting tool and carefully dotted along some of the polish. I haven't put a top coat over this as of course it is a texture glitter polish, but I may do later I haven't decided yet.

And that is the finished mani :)
I have done a mani similar to this before with zebra print, so if you want to see that then click here!

I hope you all like this design and as always if you have any questions or anything at all to say please comment below.