Manicures of Evenings Past

To get started, I figured I'd post some of my past nail designs. They started out pretty simple, but I think I've improved a lot. If anyone's interested in seeing how I did any of these designs, just post it in the comments sections and I'll do a tutorial later!

This was the very first design I did. Armed with some cheap nail polish from Claire's and a few design polishes I found at London Drugs, I more or less just started with my favourite colour and worked from there. "Okay, so my nails are blue. Now what? Um...I can probably paint a diagonal. Ooh, that looks good! Now add some silver...IT'S A MIRACLE!!!" I was glad that my first attempt didn't turn out to be a total disaster.

For my second polish, I stuck with my favourite colour. Partly because I didn't have many other options. I gave the half-moon manicure a try. It looked good from a distance. Not so much up close. I should probably mention how much cleaning up I do after painting my nails. I use the "spread it everywhere and worry about the mess later" approach, because otherwise I almost always miss spots.

And THIS was my first real attempt at a proper nail design! I found cutepolish's channel, which opened me up to a whole new world of manicures. She shows how to do very fancy-looking nail polishes that are actually not too hard to do. So I ran out to the dollar store, grabbed a few more decorative nail polishes, and set to it. I also used a makeshift dotting tool for the first time!

 It didn't take long after finding cutepolish to find her galaxy nail design. I immediately fell in love. Unfortunately I didn't own some of the colours needed, and my attempts at mixing the correct colour were less than successful. I also tried to do stippling for the first time, which turned out to be harder than I thought. I intend to try these ones again soon, maybe after my nails grow out a bit more.

Plaid nails! It turns out I've gotten fairly good at designs that only involve straight lines. Go figure. I've also figured out that people don't really notice how good or bad the individual nail designs are, so long as the pattern itself looks cool. Which comes in handy, because my left hand looks good whereas my right hand looks like it was done by a 1st grader.

 I did these, and immediately after finishing I regretted not doing two leaves on the holly. This design took me HOURS, not because it was difficult but because I first did it with a black background, decided I didn't like it, and then took it off and did it all again with this design. This happens more than you would think.

 New year's nails! It doesn't show up very well, but on the ring finger it counts down "3...2" and on my other hand it says "1...". In retrospect I have to admit that using the silver sparkles for the numbers wasn't the best idea. I still like the overall look though.

These are one of my favourite designs I did. Sure, they're more simple and not as out there and noticeable as my other designs, but I like the colour combination. It's very feminine and pretty. And easy to do, which is a bonus.

And THIS was pretty much everyone else's favourite nails. I got more compliments on this design than any other design I've done, partly because it's very bright and you can see it from a mile away. I found these incredibly distracting though. From a distance these looked like some kind of magic eye picture where if I looked at it just right, some kind of image would pop out. This was also the design that took the longest to complete; I think I spent 3 hours trying to get these right.

Last but not least, my pink leopard nails. These were not done with a stamp, every single one of those dots was painted by hand. It's not as hard as it looks, I promise. I think these ended up being my most perfect manicure, mostly because the dots and lines needed to be imperfect. Win-win.