Soft and simple nail art for piCture pOlish Blogfest!

I am super duper excited to have been chosen to take part in the piCture pOlish blogfest for 2013! We were asked to create a nail art tutorial using 3 different shades. I decided to go with some simple skittle nail art that doesn't require a lot of tools, time or skills.

Striping tape and dotting tool from Born Pretty

The great thing about striping tape and dotting tools is that if you don't have them, you can use other things! Regular tape cut into smaller strips, or even cut with patterned craft scissors is fine. Dotting tools can be substituted with toothpicks, kebab sticks, pins, tweezers, you get the picture.

The first thing you want to do is paint your nails with your base colour and let it dry. With all nail art you want a really dry base, so you don't smudge, dent or accidentally remove the base when you start playing around with designs. I used 3 coats of Sky and Fairy Floss. Camo only needed 2 thin coats.

Making stripes requires a wee bit of patience and coordination. Try to space them out as evenly as possible, lay them out straight, and ensure there are no air bubbles separating the tape from your nail. You want an excess of tape on one end so you can pull it off after adding the top layer.

Paint an even layer over the tape! You'll want to use an opaque polish for your overcoat colour so you only need to do 1-2 coats.

You can either use your fingers or tweezers to carefully pull the tape off. One piece at a time! You'll want to do this when the polish is set but not dry - so give it about 30 seconds.

Voila! Stripes!

If you don't get the tape even or laid down flat, this is what happens:

Crooked, smeary mess. Yay!

For polka dots, since I'm not very coordinated, I used varying levels of pressure to create different sizes, and placed them randomly. There are many different sizes of dotting tools, and they usually come in sets, but I just used the single large size for all my dots.

The reason that you want to use a more pigmented colour to create your stripes, is that if you use a more sheer colour as your overlay, you end up needing to pile it on and it just won't end up looking as good. Note my attempt to ignore my own advice and layer Fairy Floss over Camo on my thumb. I experienced pooling around the sides of my nail and LOTS of bubbling the next day. It also needed much more topcoat to smooth it out.

You'll need to experiment with topcoats to make sure they don't smudge your design. I waited til they were mostly dry and then used my usual Revlon Quick Dry topcoat. The polka dots smeared a teeny bit, but not much.

piCture pOlish are on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram AND YouTube. How they find the time, I do not know. Great news for non-Aussies, they ship worldwide! Details are here and a list of international stockists is here.

This year, there are three awards going for participants of the blogfest. If you want to vote for your favourite, go to Pinterest! I can't wait to see all the other nail art entries, there are some incredibly talented bloggers out there :)