A Pyramid of Solid Glass...

 

Hello!

I've been on an awesome adventure today. Me and my boyfriend took his little boy to one of my favourite places ever - The Forbidden Corner in Yorkshire. I've been as a child and then taken brownie packs more recently, and it's just so awesome. It's a big, sprawling garden full of pathways, tunnels, doorways and surprises. You explore, and are given a list of things to look out for - a statue of a demon that squirts water, rocks with faces, a tiny door, and a pyramid of solid glass! This last thing I always remember, because I remember thinking how awesome it was when I was younger! Here it is (looking a bit mucky, it was under a tree that was dropping stuff all over it so the white bits weren't very white!) ...and you can see it from above....

...And below when you find one of the underground passageways - seeing the colours better here <3

To recreate this on my nails, I used a base of Pepperminty (pale green) by Ciate. I then drew on the mosaic pattern with white nail art pen, and filled the gaps with other shades of green - Greenberry by Barry M, then my Kiko (the khaki kind of shade) and a Color Club (the kind of forest green). Once this was dry I went over the white lines again with my nail art pen, and sealed in with topcoat. Loved how these turned out!

Here they are with the pyramid!!

Full Mosaic Nails

Hello! I really liked my mosaic accent nail from my manicure the other day, and wanted to do a full manicure of mosaic-fingers, but with working every day I didn't have time to do them all at once! I made do with doing one or two per day, until I finally did my thumb this afternoon and finished the full set!

The one I'd done first was the blue/yellow/green one on my middle finger. For the other nails, I decided to keep the blue and yellow but drop the green (wasn't sure about it) and replace it with various other colours. I think my favourite combo is the purple/yellow/blue on my little finger, because all the soft pastels look lovely together.

On my last post a few people commented saying they didn't think they'd be able to do this design, so I took a few pics of the 'work in progress' to show how I did it, and that it doesn't look neat straight away- it pretty much looks a mess until the final white lines are added and it's cleaned up!

So after drawing the 'grid' and then roughly filling in the gaps with colour, I went over the grid again with the white pen (once fully dry, assisted by fast-drying topcoat!) and topped with more topcoat, then cleaned up the 'overspill' to neaten them up!

Slow work in progress:

 And the finished hand:

Pastel Mosaic

Hello! Here is today's manicure! I've wanted to do something like this for a while. I used:

This photo has made me realise how messy and polish-covered all my bottles are, oops. 

I began by painting all my nails with two coats of Utopia, the nude shade. Once fully dry, I then concentrated on my accent nail (which is only on one hand...!) I drew a random shatter-pattern using my white nail-art pen by Barry M. I then used the pastel yellow, blue and green to carefully fill in each shape. I just used the brush in the bottle for this, as it didn't need to be fully exact. Once these were dry (I used fast-drying topcoat to speed this up) I used the white nail-art pen again to go over my lines, which hid any imperfections and make the sections more separated. 

I thought the rest of my nails looked a little plain, so I decided to use the pastel colours again to create a slight gradient on the tips. Last time I did a gradient with pastels, I tried to focus it just on the tips of my nails, but because I was using three colours it didn't really work that way! This time, with only using one other colour with the base colour, I was able to achieve the 'tip' gradient quite well! As usual, I used a make-up sponge for this, and alternated the colours from the mosaic pattern on all my tips. 

I really like how these have turned out, and when I have more time I'd like to try this mosaic look on all my fingers, I reckon it could look really striking! Also, the gradient is more apparent in real life, the pics seemed to fade it somewhat! More pics, right hand with accent nail:

left hand, all gradienty: