u/dolly--spartan

And it's not seasonally appropriate at all 😅 at least not here in the Northern hemisphere!

I've been wearing a lot of "plain" (just one polish) manis recently and I feel like trying to mix it up more and get into nail art, so I am starting this mini bingo card that I made myself! It's just two-colour combos to hopefully prompt some creativity. Today's challenge was stripes, I kept them to just one nail because I know how hard I find them, but I'm happy with that! 🍬

Another bingo card (slowly) completed, I am now officially a pink lover! 🩷 I started this one months ago, but finally wrapped it up this week with the final square "One pink to rule them all", which I always knew was going to be this polish - it's just so... pink 🥰 Last photo shows it with a glitter topper added the next day too!

I love these single colour mini-cards from u/TheGreatestSandwich and I think I'll start blue next!

(sorry I have an unsightly lil injury so covered it with the 🩹!)

This one started with a very very dark blue holo number that I've had for years and want to love but don't quite, so essentially I just wanted to make it lighter/bluer and more sparkly. Then I got the idea of adding a greenish shimmer and I'm delighted with this result, it looks so cool!

Polishes used are all very old and non-US brands, but still:

• A England The Princes In The Tower
• A England Forget Me Not
• A England The Heart Desires
• Barry M Jellyfish
• RK by Kiss 'Emerald' (iridescent glitter)

just a fun little lighting effect!

Just got my first order from ajnailscollection.co.uk and had to share this beauty. It's called Aruba and I think it looks a little bit more green in person compared to the photos, I looove it 💚

This is two coats (I should've done 3 really!) of Morgan Taylor - Good Gossip, with a Catrice Base and Prism Polish UK top coat. I think the photo makes it look the tiniest bit darker than it does irl to me, it's such a perfect deep red with subtle sparkles.

Thank you to summer bingo for challenging me 😅 I avoided this square for a long time because I thought stripes would be hard and guess what? Stripes are hard! I think these look pretty good from a distance (like pic 4) and then worse the closer you get. I am however enjoying how they look like mint humbugs (not sure if this is a British thing only?! pic 3 (not my photo) shows what I mean!)

There was no way I was attempting the stripes on my right hand so I went with the old faithful dots instead and I do like how they look together.

A few of the lovely homies asked for a tutorial on this style of abstract nail art that I love to do - it reminds people of jazzy 90s leotards, hotel hallway paintings, 80s Mall Glam, abstract expressionism, pop art, Global Village Coffeehouse design and more! I've never tried to make a tutorial before though, so hope it works for you. The text kinda makes it look more long/complicated of a process than it is - probably just me overexplaining :) Okay let's go!

Ingredients

You'll need:

• 3-5 fairly opaque polishes (see step 0) - shimmers or cremes work best, they don't have to be 100% opaque in one coat, just not super sheer. I tried to use three to keep this tutorial simple, but ended up with four 🙃 I recommend 3 to start with!
• nail art pens, or a smallish dotting tool, or a toothpick
• quick dry top coat
• optional: a blurring or colour correcting base
• optional: a special effect topper or embellishments - today, making the tutorial, I decided to try gold foil; mostly recently I've been using an iridescent flakie one which works beautifully, but a glitter or a magnetic topper would be excellent too.

Method

0. Pick out three polishes that you want to see together - honestly this is the hardest/most time consuming part! I can recommend taking inspiration from something (a fabric print, a painting or photo, a scene from a film with strong colours): pick out three contrasting colours from your inspo and look through your polishes to match them. Or of course you can also start with your collection - tbh, in this case I wanted to wear the sparkly bright pink, so I was looking for two that would look good next to it. I often swatch them on a bit of card until I'm happy (there's a pic after the steps).

And do your usual pre-manicure hand and nail prep of course!

1. Apply a base coat, either clear or colour correcting depending on the colours you picked out: for lighter or neon colours, it can be nice to use a sheer white/light polish to make them pop more. Today, as my nails were looking a bit stained, I used a milky white as my base; tbh this probably doesn't make a huge difference to the finished look, it was more because I knew I'd be taking lots of wip photos and didn't want them to look gross 😅
2. With the first of your (opaque) colours, put down one or two splodges on each nail. If you have long nails you have more canvas so maybe it's 2-3 per nail for you. The great thing here is you can't really go wrong! Messy is good, brush strokes are great (try wiping most of the polish off on the bottle neck or a scrap of card, so you're going in with a dry-ish brush), but neat geometric shapes are great too! I usually put the splodge in a different spot on each nail, so if you think of them as being divided into quarters, I'll go something like: top left, bottom right, top right, bottom left, repeat.

As a general note, if you're using three colours I would think about trying to cover ROUGHLY a quarter of nail with each one, whether that's in one big splodge or 2-3 smaller ones; i.e. I want to end up with each nail something like 25% orange, 25% pink, 25% purple and 25% bare (which we may also cover later). Sorry I have no idea if that's helpful to visualise, haha.

3. Take your second colour and do the same thing. You can overlap the splodges or keep them well away from each other; I did a bit of both. 

4. The third colour should start to tie things together (although you'll notice that the design overall still looks janky at this stage. Trust the process!) You know the drill: splodge splodge splodge! In this case, because the pink is pretty light, I've gone for a lot of overlapping and kinda laid it down the middle on several nails.

4.5. Optional: refinement! This was unplanned but I felt like mine were looking too light overall and needed a bit more contrast. Luckily I had this other, punchier orange sitting there from when I was picking colours, so I added teeny bits of it on top of the orange parts and I think this helped a lot! So, see if you feel like yours needs more splodges, more colours or whatever, now is the moment!

5. Optional: sparkles! Usually I use a lovely flakey topper for this, glitter is also great, today I decided to make things exciting for myself I'd try using this gold foil that I just got. Whatever it is, you wanna just dab some on over any bits of the nail that look like they need jazzing up - maybe where there's a "big" area of one colour, or if the overlap didn't look the way you wanted it to. Also, bonus: this is a great way to cover up if you dinged or messed up a nail a little bit, like I did on my right index. Basically, for each nail, look at your least favourite part and slap some glitter/flakes/sparkles on there! Or you can skip it and go straight to the dots!

6. Add dots!! I can't explain why but they just bring it together for me. I always use black and white because 1. they go with everything 2. I have nail art pens in those colours (basically like a dotting tool but even easier). What I do is, grab a pen (white first today) and on each nail add one dot, or - most often - three dots in a little line or in a triangle. Like the sparkles, I'll usually put them anywhere that looks "plain", or in a little line on the "border" between two colours. Then I take the black pen and repeat. Then look at them and decide if it looks right? and if not, just keep adding dots until it does. Sometimes I do too many dots! It gets maximalist and that's okay too! Today tbh I think I was quite restrained and got the balance right.

7. Top coat! You'll wanna float it to not smudge your dots. To be clear, before this stage I did not wait for anything to dry (so this really doesn't take me long!)

🎉 Enjoy!

I just wanted to show a lil love for Prism Polish - although honestly I don't think I can capture how beautiful this colour is in person! The photos make it look like the base is kinda similar to my skin colour but in person it's a bit more bright, in your face pink 🩷

I'm wearing 2 coats 'Bottled Daydream', Prism base and top coat too.

I'm determined to complete this whole bingo card even if it takes me until autumn! This shifty number is what I wore for the "grass green" square - it certainly is not the first thing you think of when you think grass, but there's a wild green flash at some angles which makes it so fun to wear.

I'm using this multicoloured look for the 'free space' in my summer bingo, this style of nail 'art' always makes me happy! The secret is because it's abstract you can't really go wrong 😌

Layering a lil shimmer over a neon that usually has a very flat/satiny? finish made me love this colour!

• Prism Polish Baseline
• Nails Inc Knightriders Street
• Maybelline New Wave
• Prism Polish Glaze

Get Lobstered looks soooo good in shadow/indirect light and it's... fine? in the sun 😅

I'm wearing:

• Prism Polish Baseline
• 1 coat Golden Rose Ice Colour #241
• 3 coats Bees Knees Lacquer Get Lobstered
• Prism Polish Glaze

Of course this is really a Music, Fashion, Film summer but it's a lot more difficult to make my nails a tribute to the cover art with that one! I tried layering a little gold shimmer over the top of an old neon green and I feel like this makes the neon way more pretty and wearable? Especially love that it almost seems to glow in low light like in the second photo 🌛 (don't look at where I messed up on my thumb, thanks)

Pitaya or dragon fruit nails for summer bingo! 😋

(I see you all thinking about autumn/fall but just fyi, as a committed summer lover I will be fully clinging on to summery bright nail looks throughout August and quite possibly beyond!)

Using a silver magnetic topper (Emily de Molly - Knight in Armour) over different colours, they turned out so sweet!

Products used:

• Prism Polish Baseline
• 🩷 Golden Rose Ice Colour #241 / 🩵 Cuccio Roller Skate / 💚 Prism Polish mystery proto (sorry! it's a mint green linear holo), on alternating nails
• Emily de Molly Knight in Armour
• Prism Polish Glaze
• Two neodymium bar magnets for velvet style

I think these are both willowherb but I'm not sure which species. (These photos were taken in the same park, so near each other but not the same spot, and they look like different plants to me). The flowers are such a nice cheerful colour.

I'm not sure what you call it but I've seen some folks here share pics of their beautiful physical nail journals? trackers? like, keeping a nice organised record of what you wore? And I like this idea but I 1. am not that organised and 2. didn't want to buy a new thing... plus I have a number of these small sketchbooks that are just bound with boring cardboard (I usually draw on the covers), so here we are! I recently "completed" this first one and it's like a fun lil polish patchwork quilt!

I just add a square (almost) every time I paint my nails, and use a not-great top coat over the top - it makes a big difference to add shine on this material which is very much not like nails! It's also kinda helpful to realise how long it would take me to use up a single bottle of polish, I thought of it like "oh I'll just use up this topcoat as I have better ones" so I really slap it on there and do multiple coats sometimes and it's still almost full 😅