To celebrate the grand opening of Beautopia Nails' new Etsy shop, I'm doing a giveaway! Two people will each win a set of custom hand-painted nails. The winners can choose any design on my site or in my shop and they'll be made to order. There are a couple ways to win and you can enter daily if you so desire. I'm trying out Rafflecopter for the first time because putting in names in to the randomizer is pretty time consuming. And this way you can enter multiple times without causing me to pull my hair out and wish fervently for death! :D WIN! The contest will start today and will run until Friday, April 27th and the winners will be chosen and contacted the following day. Good luck!!!
Even if you don't win, please check out my shop and if you find something you like, or would like to order a custom set of your own, use the code BEAUTOPIA10 for 10% off your first purchase!
PS: I've never used Rafflecopter before, so if there are any issues, please let me know!!
I know I haven't posted in a few days, but I have a good excuse! I've been working feverishly creating nail sets for my new Etsy shop! I'm so excited and I hope that people actually buy them. It would be a real bummer if they didn't because I feel so proud of the work. I'm really enjoying making the sets. It's a bit of work, and I feel like I've been doing nothing else but I really, really love doing it. I have 15 items already up in the shop, two of which are just custom listings. I am going to give myself a much-deserved night off and go over and have a picnic with my hubby and kiddo at my mom's tonight, though I do plan to give her a mani-pedi. So it's there will still be nails and painting involved, but I will love the instant reward of doing an actual person's nails after a week of painting disembodied plastic.
Also, you may have notice I changed my masthead thingy. I did that to match my new business cards and also the packaging for the nail sets that I have on order. Just doing a little sprucing up around my little piece of the interwebz as I take this little step in another direction. thanks for reading !!!!
I liked the other day's watercolor nails a lot, so I used a similar technique for this design. I started out with a nude base color, then used three different polishes to make the "dip-dye" look. I put a dab of each color and used a brush and some acetone to wash it out in a line up the nail. Once I had all the colors in, I used a brush with some black polish to make some random zigzags. I wanted them to be somewhat haphazard, because I wanted it to have a sort of distressed look. It reminds me of this batik sarong I used to have, and I like it!
Here's a pretty self-explanatory nail design, the Swedish flag. I took some liberties with my interpretation, but I think it's recognizable for what it's meant to be. I did large flags on a couple nails and then small flags sort of scattered over a couple and the pinky, hell, I have no idea what that's supposed to be. I love the colors together on the nail, especially with the white!
The new watercolor trend is so pretty, and I wanted to give it a try since the weather is becoming so beautiful in my region right now. The basic technique is to paint the nails a base color, and then with several colors one after the other you dot a small amount on the nail and sort of blot it out with a larger brush with a little acetone in it. The beauty of this technique is that the less "perfect" it is, the better, so the expertise level on this would probably be at "Novice." I think there are videos on how to do this on YouTube, so search for "Watercolor Nails" and you should find something. The only trick is to use *just* the right amount of acetone to dab the paint around, and not to dab too much or it will get muddy. Paint a few nails white and give it a little practice to see what you come up with. I think it's really pretty, and with just a couple colors blotted on, it would also make a pretty background for other art on top, or even some metal studs.
I recently found Nails Inc Fouberts Place on clearance at Sephora, and was really excited to use it, but I just found myself not in the mood to wear anything too dark or drab no matter how pretty the color. So I decided to make it part of a design. I paired it with a much lighter polish in the same color family and a gold to add a little bling. Fouberts Place is a gorgeous olivey taupe and it's very pigmented, almost a one coater by the way.
I'm still in the process of figuring out how to do a gradient to my own satisfaction and it's not turning out like I'd prefer, however I did like the final product that resulted here, even though it's not how I originally pictured it. I think a lot of the reason I liked this despite my technical failure is the color palette. I really loved these colors together. I added some gold to the edge and the result sort of reminded me of a cool cabochon on a vintage cocktail ring or something, hence the name.
I recently got a backup bottle of China Glaze Flip Flop Fantasy, one of my favorite summer polishes of all time, and something weird happened. My new bottle is a lot lighter and less warm in tone than my older bottle. I do love the color of the new bottle too, and I thought it looked awesome next to Aquadelic and Electric Pineapple so I did a springy tribal look.
Products used:
China Glaze Flip Flop Fantasy, Aquadelic and Electric Pineapple
In the "Reaping" scene in the new Hunger Games movie, Effie Trinket wears a pretty and interesting nail look while she's drawing out the tributes' names. It's a sort of dark rose with a gold metallic sponged halfway down. It's such a simple and cute look to try to replicate, but I decided I wanted something slightly more blingy, so I did a different variation using a couple China Glaze polishes.
I'm pretty into tribal right now, so I basically rehashed my Feathers nail set and my Angles nail set with a different group of colors. It wasn't anything very new, but I thought it looked good and figured I'd post it. In the end my middle fingers looked like weird easter eggs... The one caveat I've found so far with my new, more rounded nail shape. Otherwise I really love the new shape, and all the new nail designs I can do that just would never work on my old squares.
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