Mani Swap with Dahlia Nails

Hey everyone! It's been a while since my mani swap with Dahlia Nails (which you can see here), and we decided that it was probably time to do a new one. If you haven't of Dahlia Nails, it's run by two lovely ladies, Jo and Emma. They're both great at nail art and you can check out their blog here. I was actually having trouble picking a design to recreate because there's so many I like! In the end I chose to recreate their 'Spring Dotticure' design. They've recreated my Negative Space Florals and my Spotted Owl designs, and they've both done them brilliantly. I think it's a nice/funny coincidence that me and Emma chose such similar designs to recreate!

Tutorial Tuesday: Polka Dot Owls for Divine Caroline

Hey everyone! I have a brand new tutorial for you over at Divine Caroline today which you can see HERE. My obsession with owls and polka dots continues as you can see, but this time it's a little different because I haven't got a nude background, which I usually seem to have when owls are involved. I really love how these turned out and I hope you like trying them out yourselves!

Don't forget to check out the steps HERE. 

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

Alice

Review Week, Day 3: Jacava London Swatches and Nail Art

Hey everyone! I'm ashamed to say I almost forgot to post today. It's 2am here and I was in bed with the lights off when I suddenly remembered I hadn't posted today's review, oops! Anyway, today's review is of a couple of Jacava London polishes: their Matte Topcoat*, and Vanilla Slice.* I was sent a few of their polishes to try out, so I'm sure you'll be seeing more around sooner or later, but these are the two that stood out to me straight away and I knew I had to try them. Once I'd mattified vanilla slice I also wanted to add a design to them, so I recycled my old 'Owl Be Yours' manicure slightly and added some polka dots and hearts. I've been wanting to redo owls for a while now so I'm really glad how these turned out

Witch Owls

Hey everyone! As halloween is starting to creep up on us a bit (see what I did there?) I thought it was time to start bringing the halloween nails around. I have 5 designs for you this year, 4 of which are tutorials so I'll be doing tutorial tuesday and tutorial thursday this week, hopefully you wont mind too much. So I'm starting my halloween nails off with these cute witch owls. These were meant to be a tutorial but they ended up a bit too long-winded so I thought I'd just keep them as a simple nail design. I got this idea from Little Miss Nail Polish, you can see her design here.

To do these I started with a base coat of OPI - Nail Envy*, followed by 2 coats of OPI - Purple-iscious*, then I painted a circle of Layla - Marshmallow Twinkle using a small brush. Once that was dry I used Alessandro - Midnight Black and a small nail brush to paint on the hat, hair and broom, and then I used MASH - White for the eyes, to finish the design off I used a bit more of Marshmallow Twinkle on the broom, and I topped the design off with a coat of my trusty Seche Vite.

Here's a shot of the gorgeous Purple-iscious alone, I absolutely love this colour. It's so unique and there's so much going on that is just impossible to capture on camera. It shows up a lot more on the bottle in the pictures than it does on the nails unfortunately. The duo of Purple-iscious and Nail Envy has been specially designed for QVC to celebrate their 20th Anniversary this year and I think they chose an awesome colour to celebrate with, don't you?

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

Alice

Exciting news!

Hey everyone! Sorry for not posting for a few days, but today I have some exciting news. Next month, I will be the featured nail artist for Scratch nail wraps! This is probably one of the (if not the) most exciting projects I've been part of since starting my blog and I'm incredibly excited for September to begin. My wraps will become available on September the 3rd, but you can pre-order the monthly mani box now here. That includes all 3 wraps (which you can see in the images below) and a bunch of other goodies, including a nail polish, studs, nail file and a secret addition, which even I don't know about! If you like the sound of that you can order it here before the 31st August for just $25

The three designs I will be including are:

-  My Scrabble Love nails, but rather than having a nude background it's translucent and you are therefore able to include any colour you wish underneath, including the colour in the Monthly Mani box. 

- My owl nails which you can see here, these are some of my favourite nails that I've ever created and I'm so excited that you can now all have this design too!

- My floral stud nails. Of course the studs can not be part of the wrap, so they are included in the Monthly Mani box instead.

I really hope that you're all as excited about this as I am. If you would like the monthly mani box you can sign up for it here for just $25 before the 31st August. Or if you like the look of just a single nail design, they will be available on the Scratch website on the 3rd September 

Let me know what you think in the comments!

Alice

*All photos are the property of Scratch

Shiny Owls

I know you've already seen these nails in yesterday's post for xameliax, but I really wanted to show what these look like shiny. You all know my obsession with matte, but for once I couldn't decide which looked better, so I left it up to Amelia to decide. So considering the pictures are already edited I may as well post them, see the original post on Amelia's blog for more information, the only difference is that I used Seche Vite top coat for these instead of Essie - Matte About You 

Hope you like them! Let me know what you think in the comments :) 

Alice

Guest post for xameliax

Hey everyone! Second post today, do you feel special? You should! I'm afraid I'm just linking you to another post again because I've done a guest post for the lovely xameliax, so if you want to read more about these nails you can do so here

Hope you like them!

Alice

Can owls be romantic?

Hey everyone! Did you miss me? It's nearly been a week since you last saw my nails! I actually did these nails last wednesday, but I knew Emily's post was coming up and I didn't want to leave you with no post this week so here you go. 

These nails are one of only two designs I've ever done directly from another artist, you can see the other here (unless I've forgotten about another one!). I have a folder of screen grabs on my laptop and I was just browsing them, not actually intending to do any nails from them, and this design really stood out to me. It was a screen grab from youtube so I went on the hunt for the original tutorial, but unfortunately it had been deleted, I managed to find a full picture of the nails here (mine was only a partial screen grab with no thumb) and decided to do my nails based from that. I know my owls aren't anywhere near as good, but nevertheless I still really like them!

I used a base of Models Own - Blooboo, and added tiny white dots using Essie - Blanc and a dotting tool, I then painted the moon in white acrylic paint, and then put a top coat straight over that, it came out pretty bumpy so I added Essence - Top of the Ice-Stream to give it a creamy tint and to hide any bumps. Then I used a tiny brush and Models Own - Nude Beige for the brances, a mixture of China Glaze - Gaga for Green and OPI - Dont Mess With OPI for the leaves, and then black acrylic paint for the writing and owls, and red acrylic paint for the hearts. All topped off with 2 coats of Seche Vite. 

What do you think? Have I done justice to the original? Let me know in the comments

Alice