52wkCrumpet14: three shades of purple

This is week fourteen of Crumpet's 52 week challenge! The "rules" are very flexible and you have all week to accomplish the mani. As always, must be done on your own nails, using the colours suggested (or parts thereof).
This week's prompt: dots and three shades of purple (either each alone or combined). I chose purple as dotting tools are next week, and I didn't feel like dots! Purple is my second favourite colour (after green) so I decided to do my signature waterfall mani. I am in no way implying that I made up the whole waterfall idea, but I use this mani a lot for clients and in my To Go sets and see it as one of my "signature" looks.

I started with two coats of OPI Peace & Love & OPI (shade 1). This is a purple based oil slick of a colour, that shimmers in green (talk about a two-puncher!!!). There are also aspects of steel grey.

Using a 00 slimmed down brush I added the wisps of the waterfall. I started with Zoya Monica (shade 2), followed by OPI A Grape Fit! (shade 3). Then I combined shades two and three into my last wisps (so technically still using three shades of purple, if you interpret "shades" as "polishes").

I took the liberty of adding some glitter as it is New Year's Eve soon and this will be my mani for that. I dabbed Glitzology Baby Dragon (a purple and green glitter) on to the cuticle base. I had to work off a palette as the polish is very thick. I also thinned it down with clear polish. This is the perfect glitter for this mani as all the colours come together.

right hand

I trimmed my nails down for a couple of reasons. A major one is to show ladies (and clients) that you can have shorter nails and still do art of groovy stuff. So many stare at their nails and think they are ugly or too short or any other reason to convince themselves that they don't want-need-desire polish. In addition, they were getting too long and typing is much easier now!

This will be my last mani – and post – for 2014. So, Happy New Year to all and may you slide into the new year with ease. Hoping 2015 will bring us all closer to nail art nirvana! Thanks all for reading and following, and I thank you for offering me inspiration in your posts and blogs. I put together my "best of 2014" page if you want to catch a peek (Best of 2014). Cheers girls! xx

An InLinkz Link-up

Mind the Gap with waterfall accent

This is a mani I wore a couple of weeks ago featuring one of my new China Glaze polishes: Mind the Gap from the All Aboard 2014 collection. The tone is an olive based golden brown with shimmer. Really very pretty, albeit a tad autumnal for our kind of wanna-be spring. I applied two coats as a base.

Using a long art brush, I then painted a waterfall effect from the cuticle with five different polishes. I started with the red, did every finger then changed colours. In the end I added some dark green glitter. I top coated with Out the Door.

right hand

This was so popular that a lady ordered a nail set in similar colours for her race day outfit! I am still working on those, so will update on that experience later. In fact, I have done quite a few client manis with this design - really quite simple but effective.

golden tone in full sun

Colours used for waterfall effect:
Zoya Pepper (brick red)
Zoya Hunter (forest green)
Zoya Evvie (grey green)
Zoya Louise (chocolate)
China Glaze Winter Holly (dark green glitter)