Pastel Owl Nail Art - With Gel Polish

Every now and again I'll give myself a gel polish manicure. It's certainly not a regular thing, as it lasts far too long for me; 2-3 weeks with the same design conflicts rather heavily with blogging! However, if I'm moving house, extremely busy or have a lot of nail art designs lined up ready to post, I'll treat myself. This was one of these occasions, and as you can see, I gave it a pastel theme with a cute little owl as a feature nail!

On the index finger I've done a light pink (or perhaps you could call it lavender?) background and carefully painted horizontal stripes across it in white polish. On the middle nail I pressed silver glitter into the polish; I've got a tutorial on how to do that here. On the ring finger I painted a little owl, one of my favourite designs to do. They're just so cute! And on the thumb and pinky I used a tiffany green background colour (I use EzFlow TruGel, by the way) and painted on white hearts.

If you've seen my post about my attempts at nail art with gel polish, you'll know that it wasn't a smooth journey to get to where I wanted to be. Gel polish is a lot runnier and prone to spreading out than normal nail polish, which means doing detailed designs is tricky. I've had lots of practice now, and have been getting lots of lovely compliments on my ability to get it to behave! I've found it's all about having the right amount of polish on the (thin) brush, and flash-curing the product. Some of my more recent gel polish works can be found here and here.

Here's the other hand - didn't turn out quite as well! I remember getting a bit impatient (it was at the end of a client day) and rushing it with the chest feathers... then laughing at how horrendously bad they turned out in comparison. They were still super cute, fun nails to wear though, so I was happy.

I hit 10,000 subscribers on YouTube yesterday! This is such an amazing thing for me; this year has been filled with many ups and downs, and it's so great to see that despite everything, I still reached my goal. A year ago I made reaching 10k one of my blogging resolutions, but I thought it a bit optimistic, considering I started the year with just 1k. Reaching it two weeks early is fantastic! I can only dream of seeing the same exponential increase next year...

Thanks heaps to everyone who's supported me since Nailed It NZ started. I'm in the progress of organising a massive giveaway to say thank you - can't wait to start it. Keep an eye out for it on my YouTube channel, all going to plan it should be up within a week or two.

P.S - I updated my tutorial page - it isn't ten miles long now!

♥