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10 December 2015

Festive Nail Art: Christmas Lights

I haven't had time to experiment with nail art designs for quite some time, so it was a nice change to sit and play around with different colours. I saw a photo of Christmas lights nail art on Polishpedia and I wanted to see if I could copy it. Mine didn't come out nearly as nice as theirs, but for a first try I suppose it isn't too bad. 




What you will need



A comfortable workspace with good lighting
Old towel

Base coat 
Coloured polish: white, black, red, green
Top coat
Quick dry drops (optional)
Polish remover 
Small angled brush 
Dotting tool or very fine nail art brush
Cotton rounds

Step-by-step tutorial

Starting off with clean, dry nails, paint a layer of base coat on your nails. You can use any base coat you like, I used the Sally Hansen Double Duty Strengthening Base & Top Coat. Let it dry.


Next, paint on two coats of white nail polish, letting each coat dry before painting on the next one. You can use any opaque white nail polish, I used Essie "Blanc" as it gives a nice opaque finish in two coats and doesn't take forever to dry.


When the white coats are dry, take your polish remover and the angled brush to gently remove any polish that might have landed on your cuticles or your skin. I love the essence Nail Art nail polish remover and the UBU angled eyeliner brush for this. You can use a cotton bud, but I find that sometimes the fibres get stuck in the polish, or that the tip is too fat and you end up taking off the polish on your nails too.

Now on to the scary fun part. You will need your other polishes as well as a tool to create your "string" and your lights. I used essence Nail Art Stampy Polish in "002 stamp me! black" as it is very opaque. For the coloured lights I used Mavala in "Cuzco" and Barry M in "Green Berry". You can use different colours if you want, anything goes! My dotting tool is from essence, but you can use the head of a pin, a bobby pin, or even a toothpick. My dotting tool wasn't fine enough so my "string" came out too thick. A very fine nail art brush wouldn't worked better, but I unfortunately don't seem to own anything like that!





Take the dotting tool (or brush) and the black polish and create a pattern for your string. I more or less followed the pattern on Polishpedia, but you can create any design you like. Then go in with the red polish and create little elongated splodges (that's a technical term) for your lights. When you're done with the red, go in with the green (or whichever colours you prefer). 




When your nails are dry, and I mean *really* dry, paint on your top coat. If your nail art isn't completely dry, the top coat will streak the colours and create a mess. For my top coat I chose Seche Vite Dry Fast Top Coat as I absolutely cannot live without it. I like to follow that with a few drops per nail of the essence Nail Art Express Dry Drops: it dries your manicure and hydrates your cuticles in one go.


And there's the final product! Let me know if you would like to see more tutorials. I'm going to go look for cheap nail art brushes for my next project, any ideas on where to get them cheap?

Until next time!

Hildegarde
xoxo

2 comments:

  1. Love it! For nail art brushes, I go to PNA and get teeny tiny ones from the art section - the smallest one is normally around R8 a brush or something

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    Replies
    1. Ah that's a good idea! I'll go look there. Thanks for stopping by, Laura!

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