Valentines Bow Nail Art How To

Valentines Day is coming up this week so I decided to bust out the pinks and draw some pretty bows. This has been done time and time again but I couldn't resist! And I wanted to use the hot pink Zoya Ali that I picked up from Ulta last year (and still hadn't touched). So I came up with this:

Zoya Ali is a hot hot pink that looks red on the nails but over white comes out very fluro pink as you can see on the bow:

Can you believe it's the same colour!? It's much more pink in real life, the flash makes it a lot warmer and I couldn't adjust the white balance enough to make true to colour. Fluro pink is hard to pick up on camera. It makes me wonder if this is the 'Ali' used in the Pretty Little Liars intro where they paint the dead girl's nails since her name was Ali. I should google it. Oh there is a whole site dedicated to the nail polish of PLL! Wow! Hmm I don't know, the base nails in the picture sort of look white enough to bring out the fluro-ness but the formula isn't that thick. This polish came out Summer 2009 and the show started in 2010. But I digress, this was three coats of Zoya Ali. I got a little distracted haha ;-)

Firstly I dotted the centre of the bow with OPI Alpine Snow. I used a dotter on the other nails but I drew it on the thumb as it needed to be a bit bigger.

Then with my trusty nail art brush I drew the two sides of the bow, outlines first.

Then I filled the bows.

This 'last' step is probably the most time consuming part. I shaped my brush to a very fine tip with nail polish remover and carefully dipped the brush in the polish and lightly drew the bow detail. I started with the dots in the middle then worked on the little ovals down the bottom and finally worked around the outline set by the white. Added some strokes in the middle to make it look 'creased' then that was it! It looks a lot harder than it was, it was just drawing fine lines.

I also decided against adding the ribbon hanging down on the nails because I thought I didn't have enough room. If I started my bows higher up I might have been able to make it work. Instead I'll keep the thumb as the 'feature nail'.

Anyway I hope you enjoyed the look and have a fabulous Valentines day if you celebrate it :-) We will probably go for a picnic next weekend since the weather this weekend has been too rainy. I plan to consume a lot of cheese, weeeee. See you next time!

Kikki-K inspired ice cream nails!

Wow where did January go?! I went on a bit of a blogging hiatus recently. I took some time to relax and get back into the new year. And it was good. I got back into exercise, spent less time online, watched a lot of vampire diaries and played a massive amount of Tiny Tower on my phone. But I have something to share today! Around this time last year I did a similar ice cream nail art post but this year mine were kikki-k inspired! If you have a kikki-k nearby or peruse the online store, you may have noticed their sundae line. So cute! And I really really want this USB drive but I guess I'll have it in nail art form first ;-)

I don't normally do white nails but I felt like something different for "summer". What summer you might say if you live in the southern hemisphere. Indeed, we've been ripped off!

So this is about three coats of OPI Alpine Snow. I spent so much time cleaning up my nails and treating them with lotions and cuticle oil that I almost stopped at this point because it was so much effort!

The first colour used to draw the outline of the ice creams is a Sephora mini. I believe it is don't feed the hand models as shown from last year's post. I stuffed up one of the outlines and had to go over with alpine snow. A top coat will fix all mistakes, so it's all good.

Next I filled the bottom ice cream layer with OPI What's With The Cattitude. It took a few coats, it wasn't quite as opaque as I would have liked over that Sephora.

The middle layer consisted of the same Sephora colour as the outline. I kept a white line in between and went over it with more white where I made mistakes. I went for a beige instead of pastel yellow here. I thought yellow might not contrast with the white enough. And quite frankly chocolate is MUCH better than banana :-D

The top layer is Essie French Affair and it's a lovely light bubble gum pink.

I filled the ice cream "sticks" with Essie Mink Muffs but I didn't like it at first and covered the thumb with the Sephora to make it less brown. I think the Essie is fine by itself but I would have used a lighter colour if I had one. After the sticks add a final top coat and that is it!

Anyway I hope you enjoyed the post and had a fabulous new year. I'm going to go play more Tiny Tower (I cannot believe how addictive that game is). Have a wonderful week everyone and I'll see you next time!