Sorry it has been so long since my last post. I was a bit ill over the new year so ended up celebrating this new years at home in my pj’s lol. I also have no clue where the time has gone so far this year. I can’t believe we are 12 days into 2013 already. However I did find time to squeeze in this winter leopard design, which was a bit of an experiment.
I wanted my background to be an off white colour, but I only have a white gloss nail varnish and a matte dark grey one that doesn’t apply very well. This is when I had my idea of using both to get the shade I wanted. I also had the thought to try and make the background look a bit textured like fur would be.
To do this I applied 2 coats of the matte grey colour. This ended up being a bit lumpy and streaky as I find matte nail varnishes go touch dry to fast to be able to apply them well. Afterwards I used a make up sponge and sponged 2 layers of the white on top of this.
Once this was done I immediately cleaned up the huge mess the sponging had made all over my fingers. I used the clean end of the make up sponge for this and found it worked better than an old eye shadow brush or cotton bud that I have tried before. However it was a bit hard to get it all off of my cuticles without risking removing any from the nail as well.
Then to do the pattern I used a dotting tool to place the blue dots on all nails. I used the limited edition Christmas blue by Barry M for this. I noticed in the photos that you can see slight flecks of gold shimmer in with it. I then added in the black details with the smallest dotting tool I have. Around the blue dots I placed the black by putting 3 small lines around the outer edge of the blue dot. I then added random small lines of black in between to fill in the gaps before finishing off with a top coat.
Ooooh, this is a really nice colour combo and executed so neatly. I love the idea of blending two shades together.