Fish Scales

This was an attempt at making some fish scales. I decided to try to ombre them after they were finished to add a little bit more visual interest. I wasn't very happy with these when I did them, but looking back at this picture I actually kind of like it. It was a very simple and quick design that ended up pretty funky. 

Mod Squares

Have you ever just been going along in your life, doing your thing and then BAM! it's Tuesday and all along you still feel like it's Saturday? That's how this week has been! I've been busy with wedding planning and tons of other crazy stuff so I've been totally forgetting to post! Which really stinks since I have tons of nails to share with you guys! Just so you know, if I ever disappear like this, you can always see sneak peaks to upcoming nail posts on my facebook.

Anyways, these are some mod looking squares. I can't remember if I've seen this design done by The Daily Nail before, but this totally reminds me of her work! I know she's done tons of mod designs, but I just don't remember if the reason I did these is because they were logged in my memory as being an awesome design that she created! Either way, I'm in love with these. I'm also in love with the color. Teal-ish blue is always one of my favorite colors and I think it looks great on nails. 

Chevrons

I apparently love the chevron look. I know I've done them a million times but you may recognize them from my profile picture (you can see a post a better picture of the nails in my profile picture here). For this design I went a little bit more complicated and tried to make the design look sort of like a checker board. I think the result was great and it wasn't even that difficult! I'll definitely be doing this one again!

This is a good opportunity for me to share with you what goes on on my right hand from time to time. Usually both my hands get painted with the same design, but sometimes I run out of time or get lazy. If that is the case I usually do a simple design on my right hand that is reminiscent of my left hand. This time I did some simple color blocks in the same colors as my left hand. Hope you enjoy!

Mod-ish Flowers

One way that I come up with new nail designs is by flipping through fabric patterns and this is a design that was inspired by a pattern that I saw. I didn't take a picture of the pattern, but I do remember that it was lime green and white. I decided to mess around with some possible wedding colors so I used a very light lavender (it looks more grey in these photographs), chartreuse, and black.

I loved how these nails turned out! But they didn't get much of a response on tumblr. What do you think?  I'm starting to think that my bad photography skills are affecting how awesome my nail art looks. 

Black and White Abstract Leaves

I don't really know if I was going for the look of leaves when I made these, but that's kind of how I felt they turned out. They are meant to be organic looking. I was inspired by a drawing that I found and unfortunately did not save, but if these look familiar to anyone, I'd love to re-find that drawing!

Black and White

These nails were supposed to look kind of like wallpaper. I am a huge fan of bold wallpaper, I think it is a necessity in any home so I wanted to try to make something bold and high contrast on my nails. I didn't have very much time so I hurriedly painted these nails. I intended to make the background colors alternate between black and white a bit more, but instead this turned out to be a white heavy design with the details in the black.

This photo actually gives me the opportunity to talk about a fun fact: I hate painting my thumbs. I almost never paint my right thumb, I don't know why but that nail is almost always bare or just a solid color. I have started referring to it as a good luck charm to not paint my right thumb, but obviously that is just a thing I say. Here I didn't paint my left thumb, I think because I was in a rush. Do you have any weird nail habits?

Grey Plaid

After I did my first plaid nails I decided that it was worth trying to come up with a slightly easier plaid design. Above is the result! These are about a million times simpler than the first one because they only require one really skinny straight line.  On my middle finger I was experimenting with doing a thicker black line, but I ended up not liking it as much. What do you think?

Plain Stripes

A thing that I need to learn how to do is tape manicures. I think my impatience kills me for doing them because I always (well, the one time I did one) put the tape down before my polish dried. This was SUPPOSED to be a super quick mani to last me through an evening out. I painted it in about 10 minutes with acrylic paints (which dry faster) and then quickly applied my top coat. But obviously I forgot that top coats require time to dry as well -- I started getting dressed and immediately ruined these nails! Without enough time to repaint, I spent the entire evening attempting to hide my nails (which is really really hard to do). I think everyone probably thought I was crazy for grabbing all my drinks with like a deformed monkey paw of a hand. Stupid ruined manicures always ruin my nights!

Plaid

My friend Erika has an affinity for plaid. I know a lot of other people share this  love of plaid with her, but I am not one of them. However, I am one who loves a good nail art challenge, and plaid never seemed easy to me. The difficulty is that you have to be able to do incredibly straight parallel lines which is really difficult when YOU HAVE A TREMOR (like me). But I had to chop off all my nails and when I have short nails I have like nothing to work with (I have really short nail beds, so I just have little itty bitty nails) and I thought plaid might be a good design to try out. Well, I ended up really liking these. I think  plaid looks great on all nail types! But it is definitely not the easiest design. It took me quite a lot of patience to do these (especially on my dominant hand), but I think they were well worth it!

Retro

I love most things retro, so this design is a homage to how fun and simple the retro look can be!  I used all acrylic paints because I didn't have a lot of dry-time (acrylic paints dry faster than nail polish). I don't do a lot of accent nails, but I think the thumb and ring finger accents are a nice touch -- They make the design a bit less cluttered.

EDIT: As inquired by Sonoma Bento (who is amazing), the inspiration for this pattern came from the below picture. I believe this is a design by Jenn Ski, who seems to make a lot of really amazing retro patterns and put them on kitchenware and other household items. I'm not 100% positive that this design came from her because I just saved it to my computer without keeping its source; however, it is named "jennski," so I can only assume! Regardless of who it's from, trying to figure it out has introduced me to Jenn Ski's amazing art, so you should check out her blog here.

Basket Weave

Ta Da! A more colorful basket weave pattern. I used a lime green and on my thumb and ring finger I did accents in yellow.  I adore this pattern, but man does it take me a long time to do!

The Blues

Here's another day where I was bored and experimenting. The basket weave pattern has turned into one of my favorite to do (there are at least two sets of pictures coming up featuring just the basket weave). I also really loved the ring finger. I told myself that I would try to tweak this design a bit and put it on all my nails, but I never did. Do you have an suggestions for how to make it not so boring?

M.C. Escher Cubes

Here are some M.C. Escher inspired cubes. I decided to splash some color onto the cubes from his Metamorphosis I, which is both less colorful and more complex than these nails. My friend Mike pointed out to me that these are also the cubes from the game Q*bert, so when I redo these again at some point, I'll probably make a little Q*bert and Coily (the snake).

Regardless of what they look like, they just look good (at least in my opinion)!

Patterns - An Experiment

Sometimes I hate planning, which means that sometimes I just start painting without thinking at all. That's where these nails came from. The checker board nails are meant to be an illusion, and if you look at them from a far... like really far... then they appear to be convex. The pattern on my index finger just came after me doodling for a while. I think there are probably about 15 layers of paint on there (good thing I wasn't using polish!). And the thumb and pinky were painted last. I literally had no idea what I was doing. I just started painting triangle/diamond shapes for some strange reason, but I LOVE how they came out. I keep meaning to do a set of nails where they are all like the thumb and pinky. Would any one be interested in a tutorial on that?

Anyways, I hope these nails inspire you to just start painting without a plan. You can get some really great, unique creations that way.

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!

A Quick Mani

While we were in New York (for four days) I got a hankering to switch my polish. The issue was that while we were running around doing lots of stuff I didn't have much time to spend redoing my nails. I decided to go WAY back and revisit the first nail art design I ever taught myself. It only took about 15 minutes to paint (because I've done it so many times) and it gave me a fresh, exciting look. I also got to try out the new polish that Ron's mom, Susie, gave me: China Glaze's In Awe of Amber. This (horrible) picture doesn't represent the color well, but it's beautiful! I have very little knowledge of polish, I am strictly interested in nail art, so I usually just buy whatever polish costs the least (I own a lot of Wet N' Wild) which made getting a China Glaze polish a special treat.

Colorful Stones

I saw some fabric with a really beautiful pattern a long time ago that inspired these nails. I think they turned out looking almost like stones on an old wall, but really colorful stones. This was a nice, simple, quick mani that I ended up loving!

NOTE: This is my 50th nail art design!

A First!

This was the first time that I ever used a brush to paint my nails. Up until this point all of my nails were dotted on with a mechanical pencil. I started out doing my nails like that because I'm not naturally artistic so holding a paint brush felt uncomfortable and I didn't know how to use it. This first attempt was eye opening -- I realized that nail art could be so much easier. I still use the mechanical pencil a lot, because honestly, I'm not totally comfortable with a brush yet. But it was nice to expand my horizons. I realized when I painted these nails that paint brushes give you much more freedom to paint different sized lines, but with that I noticed (which is very evident in this picture) that it can be hard to get consistency in the thickness of lines. I'm only just now getting comfortable with the brush (about 4 months after I painted these nails) but I sure am happy that I finally made the switch.