Nail Art: #31DC2014 Day 13 Animal Print

As you can see from the title, this post is really late! I just missed this one a while ago and never made it up. I had high hopes of doing something atypical for animal print, but I just ran out of good ideas and just did something simple. I started with a base of Pure Ice Darkside, a deep maroon with gorgeous gold shimmer and stamped leopard print on a portion of my thumb, middle and ring fingers. I also added some stripes and called it good. 

Nail Art: A Random Sampling

 Hello all! I have a somewhat unusual post for you today. I have a few nail art designs I never shared with you on my blog, but I didn't think these deserved a post on their own, so I decided to lump three nail art designs into one post! If you haven't figured it out yet, I like to play with nail designs a lot. Often I feel like the design doesn't live up to my expectations so I'll leave it on for maybe a day an take if off. The next few designs were of that variety of nail art. The first was for #nailartsep on Instagram (@HandtasticIntentions) and the theme was football. My husband is a Niners fan and I automatically thought I could represent his team on my nails for a little while at least. I'm not a huge fan of football, but why not make my husband happy and do a little nail art in the process?

The next design was one of which I wished I had taken more pictures! I wanted to try a natural colored leopard print nail and I actually think it turned out pretty well. I used some simple dotting tools to achieve this look. Nude: Ruffian, Naked, Brown: OPI, Wooden Shoe Like to Know, Black: Ruffian, Ciré Noir, Top Coat: NYC, Matte Top Coat. Ruffian nail lacquer can be found at Birchbox which is exclusive to the site. I bought the classics set which came with a nude, black and red. Once I finished my design, I felt like I had to have a matte finish, and I really enjoyed the final look. Makes me wish I had a better matte top coat!

This last design is one I had originally planned on writing it's own post about, but I didn't really like this one as much as I thought I would. It was inspired by one of Miss Jen Fabulous' designs seen on her YouTube channel. Pretty easy to do if you have dotting tools and an interesting look. I might try this again with different and more contrasting colors. I used A England Tristam for the dark blue and OPI Thanks a Windmillion for the lighter blue.

This was a pretty random assortment of designs, but I hope you like them! Let me know if you want a tutorial on any of these!

Nail art: Orange Leopard and Chevron Nails

Hello all! I've been thinking about animal print and particularly leopard print a lot lately. I don't usually wear animal print, but I like it. Sometimes I think it is a bit too wild, but I like mixing it with solids. That's kind of what I did here. I decided to create an unnatural leopard print coloring of orange and red and added a deeper red overlay to kind of balance out the print. I did this for #nailartsep on instagram.

I used only the above polishes in this mani from left to right: Soul Mate, Cherry Bomb, Mind's Eye (All Orly). I started with a base of Cherry Bomb and added irregular spots of Soul Mate. Then I added somewhat irregular C shaped around the spots and added some random dots using Mind's Eye. After I let it all dry, I cut up some tape into smaller angled triangles and painted Mind's Eye over that to create the sharpened chevron tip. This manicure made me want to perfect my leopard print painting skills, so look out for a more natural leopard spot on the blog soon! Thanks for reading!