#31dc2014 Day 30: Inspired by a tutorial

I can see the light! The light at the end of the challenge tunnel! Only one more mani to go and it will all be over for another year. I look forward to Day 30 and 31 as I get really inspired by the daily themes, tutorials and honouring nails you love. For today's nails I really wanted to try and work on my dry marbling skills. I love swirling polish randomly, I think it looks floaty and gel like. So to challenge myself I decided to try to make an actual dry marble pattern. 

I turned to Youtube for guidance and came across a tutorial by Sveta Sanders Nails. Wow, she is amazingly talented. The video made it look so easy!  It took me a while to find 2 polishes that worked well together. I'm no expert at this technique but I found creally (jelly/cream) polish that has decent opacity seemed to get the best results. I used Picture Polish - Candy and Picture Polish - Mad Magenta. 

I took my first attempt off and totally redid them because the first lot were horrendous. These ones made the cut...just. Go check out Sveta's if you want to see this design done amazingly well. 

Speckled Easter Eggs

Happy Easter everybunny! I hope you have had a lovely weekend with your family and friends and that the bunny was kind to you all. Now onto the Easter Nails.....candy speckled eggs. Read on for a tutorial.

After trolling through a bazillion IG Easter nails pics over the last few days I was ready to get my bunny on. I had it all planned out to do a kitchen sink mani with bunnies, eggs and of course some polka dots with a glitter accent. But I think I must have used up all my bunny powers yesterday at the markets....I see you cute little bun bun, hop, hop, hop!

I must have spent 3 hours last night messing around with combos trying to recreate the mani I did yesterday but nothing looked right. In the end I gave up and watched a tonne of Game of Thrones episodes instead. After a fresh cup of coffee the next day it came to me as I reminisced about my childhood.  Every year the bunny used to bring these hard candy eggs with little yellow and purple candy hearts inside of them, a pastel pink egg for me and a pastel blue one for my brother. Its a miracle we never chipped a tooth on those things, they were like rocks.....delicious rocks!

For this mani I used the Glad Wrap or Saran wrap technique. It dilutes the polish to create subtle colours like a water painting or a beautiful piece of marble.  Its really easy, albeit a little messy, but I highly recommend giving it a try as it gives such a pretty end result. 

The polishes I used in this mani:

Barry M - White

Barry M - Blue Moon

Barry M - Strawberry Icecream

Barry M - Lemon Icecream

Zoya - Miley

Essie - Playdate

So now on to the tutorial. I did this a little while ago with different colours but the technique behind it is the same, just with more colours.

Step 1: Apply one layer of a base colour. If you are using just 2 colours, apply a coat of the light one. For my Easter mani as I was using 5 pastels I did a white polish base.

Step 2: Dribble blobs of polish onto the Glad wrap but make sure they are touching.

Step 3:  Fold the Glad Wrap over on itself and mush all the polish together by tapping lightly on top of the Glad Wrap.

Step 4: Unfold the Glad Wrap to open it up, then dunk your nail over a spot where the polish has marbled nicely together. If you have any bare spots on your nail dunk it again. 

Step 5: You will get polish on your skin, so apply sticky tape to cover your skin to limit clean up, or skip it and use a cotton bud and remover to clean up. Because the polish is diluted a bit clean up isn't too bad. 

This was the finished product when I used just 2 colours. 

Would love to see pics if you give this technique a go. Tag me on Instagram  @dramaqueennails

Happy Easter!