PAA’S Monday Nail Art Challenges – Animal, Splatter and Layer

I’m a bit behind on updating my entries for PAA’S Monday Nail Art Challenge, not that I haven’t been doing them, I have… I’ve just gotten behind on my photo editing.  I had to replace my laptop recently and one of the main problems with my old one was that I couldn’t edit more than one or two photos before laptop came to a halt.  It was very frustrating… but now I have an awesome new machine and am back in action!

Three weeks ago the theme was Animal, which meant you could do anything that had to do with animals. Animal prints, animal nail art, whatever…  I had seen this post by Grace from Oooh, Shinies! about a snow leopard mani, and I was in love. I knew this was what I wanted to do for my animal theme!

Products used:
Essence Nail Art Protecting Base Coat
Essence 50’s Girls Reloaded Ahoy (White)
Konad Black Stamping Polish
Konad Plate M57
Essence Silver Stampy Polish (Silver spots)
Seche Vite Topcoat

Last week the theme was Splatter… boy, what a challenge that turned out to be.  The way splatter is meant to be done is to take a thin straw and dip it into a blob of polish so that it covers the opening at the end of the straw, then you blow through the other end, causing the polish to splatter onto the nail.   Well, easier said than done!  The straws I bought were far too wide and wouldn’t work, so I tried disassembling a pen and using the narrow opening where the tip of the pen sticks out to pick up the polish and blowing on the other end.  By the time I got that far, all the blowing was giving me a headache, so I went for the hand drawn, fake splatter look instead.

This is done by putting a drop of paint on your finger and dragging it out with a toothpick or fine dotting tool.  I had a lot of fun doing this!

Products used:
Essence Nail Art Protecting Base Coat
Essence Multi Dimension XXXL Shine Fatal (Black)
Essence Multi Dimension XXXL Shine Found My Love (Light Purple)
Catrice Easy Peasy, Lemon Squeezy! (Green)
Essence Colour & Go Let’s Get Lost  (Blue)
OPI  Planks a Lot (Dark Purple) & Sparrow Me The Drama (Pink) from the Pirates of the Caribbean Collection
China Glaze Fairy Dust (Glitter topcoat)
Seche Vite Topcoat

The theme for today was Layering, which is a little vague but I gather it just meant anything to do with layering one polish on top of another.  Unfortunately, I have an appointment tomorrow that I don’t think would be appropriate for really flashy polish so I chose to just stick a fake nail on my practice finger and do my idea on there.  It still counts!

Products Used:
Essence Nail Art Twins Thelma (Base coat, looks black but is really a dark purple)
Essence Nail Art Twins Troy (Glitter)
Pink Nail Striping Tape
Seche Vite Topcoat

I decided that instead of layering the entire nail I would do part, and try something different.  I got a package in the mail today with some items I ordered a few weeks ago from Born Pretty, which is a great shop in China where you can buy lots of nail items for seriously cheap prices.  Oh, and the best part?  FREE SHIPPING – WORLDWIDE!

I wanted to use one of my new products so I thought it’d be nice to border the two separate sections with some of the striping tape, so I could test it out.  I got 12 colors for only $7.99 (5,50 euro) which I’m pretty sure is enough to last me a lifetime!  You get a lot on those little rolls, it’s really surprising.

Be prepared, I see a striping tape frenzy in my future!

If you would like to get in on the Facebook nail group action, shoot me a message on Facebook and I’ll see about getting you an invite!