Luck o' the Limes!

Happy St. Patrick's day, everyone! Am I Irish? Not a bit, but I can never pass off an excuse to do my nails to an occasion. If you like green, you've come to the right place! Unfortunately, it's my least favourite colour, but I quite like these nails. Why Luck o' the Limes? I'm English. I'm a Limey!

Anyway, I think this blog will be another picture spam. I did take quite a few with and without interesting effects. First, you might notice that my nails are considerably shorter. I took a pencil and marked the half-way point on my tips and filed down to the line. Here is a comparison photo that my brother kindly took:

The nail glue makes my nails look kinda dirty, sorry. Also, you might be able to see that my right (left in this picture) thumbnail broke. The corner just came clean off, but once I filed it much shorter, it looks square again. So... to the green!

So much green! It's a nice excuse to use some of these colours. When I don't particularly like a colour, I don't really include it in my designs. But since Claire bought me the green sparkles for Christmas, I've been dying to use that polish again! So for this design, make sure you have a good base coat like usual, and paint your nails completely white. I used Quo by Orly's "French White". You'll need this white to make the colours pop out more, and although it won't do much to the darker shades, you really need a white base for the lighter ones or they won't look too great.

Dosn't have to be perfect, it just has to be white. So, onto the colours. You can do this step in a bunch of different ways from regular stripes to splattered effect to drag effect, to sponging, or you can follow along with what I did. If you notice, the gradient with this design is smoother than it normally is. Well this is how I did it.

Nice and messy! I took 4 different shades of green and starting with the lightest, I splodged them onto my nails in stripes, slightly overlapping each other. the lightest green is Sally Hansen Ceramics "Ghoulish Green" which, to be honest, is a really nasty colour! It's a short of shimmery greeny yellow. Brilliant for Halloween. The next lightest is MigiNailArt's "Kelly Green". The second darkest shade is Princess Collection "Electric Green", and the darkest is Nail Jazz "Green". Here is something I've not said before... Don't let these dry completely! Shocker! Let them get slightly tacky, so by the time you've placed all of these colours on one hand you should be fine. Once they were tacky I took OPI's "Fresh Frog Of Bel Air" and applied it thickly over my nails. This is the glittery green. It's actually a clear coat with sparkles in it, so the clear polish smudges the other polishes, turning them into a gradient. If you try with with regular clear polish, it will still work, but you'll contaminate the clear with whatever colour your'e using. It contaminates this OPI polish, too, but because it already contains a lot of green, you don't really notice it as much. Finish off with a top coat, and you're done! Time for a photo spam!