Little Night Flower

The prompt for this week is New Year. In the North East of Scotland when things get cold, a lot of the celebrations seem to involve setting things on fire.  New Year, is no exception.  In a village called Burghead on the Moray coast there is a tradition called 'Burning of the Clavie' which happens on 11 January (New Year on the Julian calendar).  More information can be found here: http://www.burghead.com/clavie/ This is what I have based my design on for this prompt. More details after the jump.

The prompt for this week is Christmas. I have taken a traditional route for this and painted Santa stuck in a chimney. My nailbeds are quite curved so it is sometimes difficult to get a picture of an image painted on the whole nail, but I have tried my best. More details after the jump.

The theme for this week is Winter. When we get a harsh winter the one thing you see everywhere is icicles. More details after the jump

This week's prompt for the Crumpet's Nail Tarts is glitter topper or flakie and my technique to go with this prompt is splatter. More details after the jump.

The prompt for this week is cartoons and comics and I have taken Harley Quinn as my inspiration. More details after the jump.

The prompt for this week is grey with colour.  My technique to go with the prompt is skittle. More detail after the jump.

The theme for this week is your job.  As I work in tech support I had to have something computer related. More details after the jump.

Nice easy one this week.  The prompt was black and white and the technique I have to accompany the colours was saran wrap. More details after the jump.

I'm a little late with this one, but I've been away.  As my son is currently in the Haematology ward my inspiration for Halloween was vampires and in particular the classic black and white horror film Nosferatu. More details after the jump.

The theme for this week was green, purple and orange. To go with this I got the pattern/technique prompt roses.  And this is what I did: More details after the jump.

The theme for this week is Geeks.  I'm posting late this week as I had to get my geek on and set up the Xbox One my son got for his birthday.  He is finally home from hospital for a few days and getting the chance to use his new console for the first time. More details after the jump.

The prompt for this week is Teal.  For all the colour weeks in this challenge each participant is also given a different pattern or technique.  My technique for teal was reciprocal gradient. I thought I would use a stamp to overlay the second gradient rather than the usual tape technique.  This also shows I couldn't make up my mind which pattern to use on the stamping plate so decided to use more than one. More details after the jump.

I had great plans for this return to blogging by starting a new nail art challenge.  I still intend to take part in the challenge but sometimes life goes and throws a big spanner in the works.  At the beginning of September my son was admitted to hospital and diagnosed with Adult Acute Myeloid Leukaemia or AML for short. He is still in hospital after having his first cycle of chemotherapy which lasted for 10 days! This means at the moment my hobby is hospital visiting (the hospital is 60 miles from home). As I don't like driving into the city (Google Haudagain Roundabout to find out why) and there is very limited parking I am taking the bus to the hospital which takes just over 2 hours. More details after the jump.

I bought a nail foil kit a while ago but I had not tried it out.  I started with something simple as it was my first time and I was trying it out on a nail wheel. More details after the jump.

I've created quite a few looks with a dark blue base so I thought I would use a light blue base for this prompt. More details after the jump.

I'm a fan of glitter (but not glitter removal) and it is my default topper for a mani, so this one took a bit of time to come up with an idea.  However I really like the finished look.   More details after the jump.

For this prompt I recreated this look I did for a tri polish challenge a while back.  I decided not to do an exact copy but changed the colours.  Also I was using a nail wheel which has larger nails than my natural nails which expanded the design a bit. More details after the jump.

I really like the look of a fishtail braid and it is a good  chance to try a few different colours together to see how they compliment each other.  I used a combination of a foil polishes and a holographic polish as they dry quickly and give a good level of coverage with just one coat. More details after the jump.

I recently bought some new OPI polishes which I thought would work well for this prompt. However, this did mean I'd have to paint with polish rather than acrylic paint which I usually do.  This is the end result. More details after the jump.

For this look I had decided to create decals on a stamper.  However, as I was painting on a nail wheel there was no room to apply the stamp across the whole nail only the centre line. More details after the jump.

I decided on a simple bold design for this prompt. More details after the jump.

I wasn't sure how to interpret this one, but I decided it was adding blobs without using a dotting tool and just going with the shapes that were created. More details after the jump.

Shades of green made me think of leaves and vines so I created this look. More details after the jump.

There is so much you can do with rainbow and this time round I decided to try a leopard print.  This was inspired while I was searching for images on Pinterest and found the design here . More details after the jump.

I thought I would have a go at a no water marble as it creates a great effect for fire.  You may have noticed that I have been creating my manis on a nail wheel.  This is because I have had a catastrophic (for a nail blogger) nail break and will have to wait until the nail has grown out until I can properly remove the broken section of nail.  I didn't want to pull out of the challenge so I have completed it using nail wheels and tips. More details after the jump.

My inspiration for this look was Claude Monet's Irises. More details after the jump.

I really love the work Robin Moses does and her YouTube tutorials are so good for learning the necessary techniques to create nail art with arcylic paint.  I picked this look to recreate because it fits with my ability level at the moment.  I also need to invest in some more brushes before trying anything more adventurous as mine are a bit worn out. More details after the jump.

I love the quiet time, especially in the Summer, when the sun starts to rise in the morning, but you can still see the stars in the sky.  That inspired this look. More details after the jump.

I've wanted to try this technique for a while and I seem to have acquired quite a few green polishes, so I thought I would see how I could combine a few of them. More details after the jump.

I picked up a few China Glaze holographic polishes in the sale at Sally's a while ago and thought I would use a few of them for this prompt.  As the polishes have sci-fi inspired names I went with a space theme. More details after the jump.

I decided to use an image that I already had saved on one of my Pinterest boards.  I liked the basic graphic nature of this red ballet shoe image and the colour combination with the background. More details after the jump.

I went to see the Tim Burton directed film Big Eyes recently.  This inspired me to try to create this mani for the film prompt. More details after the jump.

This design was the reason I didn't include trees in the Little Red Riding Hood mani, as I didn't want to repeat myself. More details after the jump.

This prompt took me straight to my stash of Barry M glitter polishes.  It has glitter, with glitter and a bit more glitter on top. More details after the jump.

As the trailer for Into the Woods seems to be everywhere at the moment it inspired me to create this fairy tale themed look for the red base prompt. More details after the jump.

I decided to opt for more subtle shades of grey, rather than a sharp black and white contrast for this prompt.  I like to think of this as a rainwashed ombre look. More details after the jump.

For this prompt I wanted something quite bold.  Hopefully I've achieved that with this look. More details after the jump.

I've never been good at measuring things exactly so this half and half mani has the two halves merging into each other. More details after the jump.

I'm playing catch up with this challenge as I've been really busy at work and not had time to edit the pictures and write up the blog posts.  To make up for this I will be publishing a few posts each day this week. For day 5 I was inspired by the colour combination of two new polishes I bought in the January sales at TK Maxx. More details after the jump.

What makes me happy?  Lots of colour, music and cute things.  I have tried to represent these things in this mani.  I even managed to take the photo during daylight hours, so the colour balance is a bit better this time. More details after the jump.

Oh my goodness this was a messy one!  I've never tried this technique before and I needed quite a few goes before I managed to have more than just a splodgy, gloopy mess.  It looked really simple and straight forward in the YouTube videos, but I've fallen into that trap before. More details after the jump.

I got the inspiration for this design while catching up with the tv series Gotham.  The character played by Jada Pinkett-Smith, Fish Mooney, has black hair with red tips and I really like this mix. More details after the jump.

A new year and a new start.  I don't think I have actually painted my nails since my last blog post, I've been so busy with work.  However, just recently I have spoiled myself and bought a few new polishes with the idea that I would get back to blogging. What better way to get back into things than taking on a challenge, so here goes The Crumpet's Nail Tart's 31 Day Challenge 2015.  Day 1 - Follow a Tutorial. How cute is this little guy?  I found him on the She Who Does Nails blog .  A seasonal design to start off the challenge and I really liked this cute little penguin.  More details after the jump,