Tiger Stripes

It's Thursday and that means you should pop over to Polish Art Addiction to see my latest Peculiar Polish (I did Family Guy nails this week)!

In line with my new love for animal prints I thought I would do some tiger stripes. I've seen these gradient tiger stripes before and figured I'd try them out myself! Every time I looked down at these nails I was reminded of one of my favorite childhood books: How the Tiger Got Its Stripes. The book is originally a Viatnamese folk tale and I'm not sure which version I used to read, so I can't tell you an author. Another great book in the series was How the Peacock Got Its Feathers. Anyways, I loved these simple nails and wore them for ages. I used a special top coat on them which I'll be posting about soon. It is a special hardening top coat that doesn't need to cure under a UV light but acts like typical gel top coats. 

Here's the nails before I added the stripes. You can see that I put a holographic coat over the gradient to really make them pop!

Striped Gradient

You may remember for Halloween that Michelle from Sonoma Nail Art did a spooky candle gradient during her 30 day challenge (if you don't remember, you can see it here). I thought it turned out totally awesome and used it as inspiration for these nails! Instead of doing a normal faded gradient, I used curved stripes to give the look of gradient nails. I loved these because from afar they look like normal gradient nails but up close they have awesome detail! After painting these I realized that they looked like the sky, so after a few days of wear I ended up painting some flowers coming out of my cuticles. This ended up being a mistake: they looked weird and it took away from the simplistic awesomeness they already had.

Have a wonderful new years celebration tonight! I will be posting my favorite nails of the year tomorrow, so make sure to check back to see some old designs!

Brown Gradient

I was trying to go for a brown autumn-y gradient. But instead my nails just look dirty. I used holographic nail polishes to add some sparkle to this design, but it just ended up looking weird.

Don't forget to check out Leslie's blog Polish Art Addiction to see my newest Peculiar Polish blog, which is about Avatar: The Last Airbender. (There's even a tutorial!)

Halloween on Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! 
I thought I'd celebrate by sharing more old Halloween nails with you!

Here's another design by the amazing Lex at Attacked Astoria Nails. If you can't tell by the fact that I love to attempt her designs, I think she has a really awesome style. You can see her original nails here. She used a shimmer to top off her gradient, but because I don't own any shimmers, I ended up using Kleancolor's orange holo. I thought that it blended the gradient background perfectly.

Gradient Swirls

These are a direct copy of Lex from Attacked Astoria, whose design can be seen here. It's a great design, which Lex executed much more skillfully than I. Lex's nails are all incredible. I would highly recommend checking her out because she has a unique flair that really sets her apart from all the rest.

Also, I think I'm becoming bored of blogging. Does anyone have any words of encouragement?  

Gradient Triangles

This is a really easy pattern that yields an interesting look. To achieve this look first create a gradient nail. Here I used pink, orange and yellow for my gradient. I painted my nails pink, then sponged on the orange in the middle of the nail and finished the gradient with sponged on yellow at the tip of the nail. Then you simply paint the triangle pattern over the finished gradient. Below are some directions that I made on how to paint the triangles. Hope this helps! And if you try it out, I'd love to see the final product!