Happy Accident Nail Art (Black and White Line Design)

Hello people!

I hope you're all doing well.
It has been extremely cold here today, but that has not slowed us down!
We were working on a garden project this morning, which warmed us up quite nicely. 
I decided not to paint my nails today so that I could help out with the garden. It was fun, but I got so much dirt under my nails, I was a little horrified.
This week's nail art is a design I wasn't going to post, but I figure, why the heck not?
After all, it's not all that bad, just not what I had intended.

I started out with plans to create a Fall Out Boy (my favorite band) nail art based on the American Beauty/American Psycho Album cover (see here), but seeing as though I can't really draw, things went south pretty quickly!.
However, instead of starting all over again I decided to continue and see what would happen.
So here it is, Happy Accident Nail Art aka Black & White Line Nail Art!

Happy Accident Nail Art

I used these polishes:
Blanc by Essie
Lady In Black by OPI
Base & Top Coat by Rimmel
Big Kwik Dry Top Coat by Sally Hansen

I also used these tools:
Thin & short striping brush
Sandwich bag

Happy Accident Nail Art with Blanc

I started with one coat of Top & Base Coat. I am using this one at the moment to help my nails with the colder weather. Once dry I applied two coats of Blanc, then grabbed a sandwich bag and applied a drop of Lady In Black to it. 
Taking my thin & short striping brush, I dipped it into Lady In Black and started with two vertical stripes on my index nail; one in the center and one to the right. I intentionally made them imperfect (which was a little too easy, ha ha).
I then moved to my middle finger and attempted to create a star. After realizing I had made a mistake and wasn't going to get what I wanted, I turned it into a line pattern by duplicating the first line of the "star". I then added another straight line to my index finger to tie them together. Moving on, I added rough horizontal lines to my ring finger and some very lazy chevrons on my pinkie nail. To finish off, I applied a coat of Kwik Dry Top Coat.

Happy Accident Nail Art with Lady In Black

I am a little disappointed that my initial design didn't work out, but I actually do like this rough line design. To be honest, I really like anything that looks slightly distressed, nail art or otherwise.
I plan to attempt the Fall Out Boy nail art again at some point in the future. I will probably use vinyls next time though, since I have no hope of actually drawing tiny stars at the best of times. 

What do you think?
Have you done band nails before?
Let me know by leaving a comment!

Thanks for stopping by!

Geode Nail Art

Hello everyone!

I hope you're doing well today. I had a good weekend, despite the crappy weather we had yesterday.
My sister came to visit, so that brightened things up a bit.


Once again, I got my inspiration from a collection of nail polishes I bought last week. They were a series of glitters and shimmers from Ulta3 that I could not resist. I put them on my newly installed nail polish shelf (that my amazing partner built for me), in the designated "unused" section. This is where I put new polishes that I have yet to use.
These polishes were staring me in the face every time I was on my computer, inspiring me with their glittery and shimmery goodness, so I decided to try out a geode design. I've been wanting to do one of these for a while, but the other methods I've seen look pretty time consuming and honestly, I don't really have the patience for it. Ha ha. 

Below, I've listed all the polishes and tools I used to create this glittering nail art. 

Geode nail art in direct sunlight

Here's the polishes I used:

New Years Eve by Ulta3 (Blue glitter)
Spark It Up by Ulta3 (Gold glitter)
Twinkle Toes by Ulta3 (Silver glitter)
Infamous by Ulta3 (Blue/Green fine glitter)
Enchanted by Ulta3 (Purple and green duo chrome)
Big Peel Off Base Coat by Sally Hansen
Kwik Dry Top Coat by Sally Hansen

Here's the tools I used as well:

Short striping brush
Dotting tool
Sandwich bag

Geode nail art in indirect light

I started with a coat of Big Peel Off Base Coat, in order to assist with removing this mass of glitter.
Can you imagine trying to get this off with acetone? No thank you!
Once that was dry, I applied two coats of Enchanted as my base colour. While I waited for that to dry, I collected my glitter polishes, a sandwich bag and my brushes. Using Infamous, I painted a small amount somewhere in the middle of the nail, varying the shape and size of coverage on each nail to get a more natural stone shape. I did look up geodes online to get a rough idea.
I placed a large blob of New Years Eve onto the bag, then used a short striping brush to pick up as much glitter as possible and started painting it on around the previously applied Infamous. As it turned out, this brush didn't work out very well, so I switched to a small dotting tool instead. This enabled me to pick up more pieces of glitter and less polish.
I was then able to place the large glitters wherever I wanted to. 
Moving on to Twinkle Toes, I repeated this process, using the dotting tool to place glitters around New Years Eve. This created another layer to the geode.
For the final layer I used the short striping brush to paint a smaller amount of Spark It Up around the silver glitter. I decided not to apply as much gold glitter; as I still wanted the base colour to come through, I only applied small amounts randomly around the silver glitter.
After allowing plenty of time to dry, I finished off with a Kwik Dry Top Coat. 

Geode nail art with Infamous in indirect light

I lovvvvvved this design!
It's so shiny, I couldn't help but wriggle my fingers every time my nails caught the light.
So magical!
Each of these colours are so beautiful in their own way. 

On the downside, it ended up being so thick!
Due to the amount of clear polish going on with the glitter, it created a mini polish mountain (polish hill maybe? ha ha).
Luckily I put the peel off base coat on, otherwise this would have been a nightmare!

Geode nail art with Enchanted in direct sunlight

I was so happy that I managed to get all but one of these new polishes into this design. The other one is a bright red glitter, so it wasn't going to fit into this design very nicely.
That's okay though, I'm pretty sure I will be able to do something awesome with that one another time.
Keep your eyes out for that one! 

What do you think? 
Have you done a geode style nail art?
Leave me a comment below.

Thanks for stopping by!

Boho Gradient Nail Polish

Good afternoon readers!

I hope you are all well.
As for me, unfortunately I've had a cold for about a week now, but it's slowly working it's way out. Luckily, I am currently well enough to do some nail art.
Let's hope it get better from here!

As you're most likely aware, I didn't get a post out last week... For that, I'm slightly sorry. Only slightly because I was extremely exhausted after my trip. But, I did have fun while I was there. Happy to be home though, always happy to be here.

This week's nail art was inspired by two polishes that I had sitting next to each other...Happens all the time! I love my organization skills, haha!
I decided to do a gradient for this one, but soon realized it was missing something. So I added some stamping!
I present to you now, the Boho Gradient!

Below you'll find a list of polishes and tools I used to create this mani. 

Boho Gradient Nail Art 

These are the polishes I used:

Summer by piCture pOlish 
Orchid by piCture pOlish
Sparkling Cyan-ide by Hit The Bottle
Tipsy Grasshopper by Hit The Bottle
Ready To Take Off by UNT Cosmetics
Big Kwik Dry Top Coat by Sally Hansen

These are the tools I used:

Cosmetic sponge
Stamping plate BP - 152 by Born Pretty
Large clear stamper
Plastic scraper
Cotton balls
Mani saver
Liquid latex by LuLaa

Boho Gradient with Orchid 

I started by applying one coat of Ready To Take Off base coat. Once dry, I applied liquid latex around each nail, then painted two coats of Summer on each nail.
After allowing to dry, I grabbed my cosmetics sponge and brushed Summer and Orchid across it. I then dabbed it on each nail, re-applying polish to the sponge after every few dabs. Once satisfied with the gradient, I removed the liquid latex.
After allowing ample time for everything to dry, I applied Big Kwik Dry Top Coat. While that was drying I grabbed stamping plate BP - 152, a stamper, a scraper and the stamping polishes. I chose the design I wanted, then painted a few blobs of Sparkling Cyan-ide and Tipsy Grasshopper over the design. I then scraped off the excess polish, which also blended them together, then picked up the image and pressed it onto the nail. I did this for all five nails, then finished off with Big Kwik Dry Top Coat.

Boho Gradient with Sparkling Cyan-ide & Tipsy Grasshopper

I enjoyed this design, both wearing and creating it. I did mess up a couple of the stamps, due to the polish drying out a little too quickly. But, that's nail art life for you! Ha ha.
These colours are so fun together. So much holo!

The gradient was a little harder to do than usual. Both of these polishes contained glitter, which meant I was basically just dumping it straight onto my nails.
I did get there in the end though, and turned out amazing, if I do say so myself. 

What do you think?
Do you like this as much as I do?

Thanks for stopping by!

Blue Ocean Nail Art

Hey everyone.

This week I have a jam packed design for you! Its got glitter, its got stamping and its got pearl gems! 

I bought this amazing blue glitter polish and I have been dying to use it! So this is what I have come up with. Check it out:

Blue Ocean with Boys Boys Boy - Chi Chi

This was a really fun design to do. I used the following:
Boys Boys Boys - Chi Chi
Splash - piCture pOlish
White Stamping Polish - Born Pretty
Blue and Purple gradient pearls
White pearls
Stamping Plate 14 - 春の歌  
Ready to Take Off - UNT

Blue Ocean with Splash - piCture pOlish

I started with a peel off base coat, for easy glitter removal. Then I applied two coats of Boys Boys Boys to all but my ring finger. On this finger I started with one coat of Splash, and once dry I used a cosmetic sponge to dab on more glitter until fully opaque. I painted a thin coat of Splash on each nail, excluding the pinky. Once dry, I used stamping plate 14 and White Stamping polish to place the shell images in different positions on my first two nails. To apply the pearls I used a quick dry top coat on the nail, then used tweezers to place the pearls on the nail. Once dry, I finished it all off with a quick dry top coat.

Blue Ocean Nail art design

As I said before, I really enjoyed this. Splash is probably the best glitter polish I own, it is totally packed with glitters and it still applies really easily! Very happy with this purchase.

What do you think? Let me know below!
Thanks for stopping by!

Matte Stamping & Gradient with piCture pOlish

Welcome back lovely people!

I finally caved and bought me some piCture pOlish nail polish recently. They have a matte top coat called 'G'day Matte' which I thought was totally appropriate for The AustraNailian! So, of course I had to get it. I also purchased another awesome polish called 'Orchid' - a beautiful purple with silver holo flakes - and that is what inspired today's design.

Matte Stamping & Gradient

I also used Essence - Queen Of The Amazon which is a purple plum shimmer, Born Pretty - White stamping polish, Celestial - Camo Coat & QGirl stamping plate - 035.

This design was fairly simple. I applied two coats of Orchid on four of my nails, two coats of Queen Of The Amazon on my ring finger and allowed them to dry. Using plate 035 & white stamping polish, I stamped the design on top of the Orchid. Using Camo Coat to protect my skin, I applied Orchid & Queen Of The Amazon on a sponge to make a gradient on my ring finger. I applied a quick dry top coat to all and finished with G'day Matte top coat over the stamping designs, leaving the gradient with the shiny top coat.

Matte Stamping & Gradient with Orchid - piCture pOlish

I thought it would be interesting to have two different finishes on this design and I believe I am right. It looks awesome.

This Matte top coat is making me fall in love with matte designs. I have never really been a fan, but I guess I just didn't have the right formula. Keep an eye out, I plan on using this one at lot more.  

Matte Stamping & Gradient Nail Art Close Up

What are your thoughts? Have you done different finishes in one mani? Would you do this?
Leave me a comment and let me know. 

Matte Stamping & Gradient with QGirl Plate - 035

That's all for today, so thanks for stopping by!

Christmas Wrapped Present Nail Art!

Hello all!

Welcome back! I have once again decided to do some Christmas nails. As I mentioned in my previous post, I had so many different ideas, so I thought "Why not do one more?"

Today's design is a simple one. I was going to do more skittle nails, but I'm not sure I'm a fan. These ones are "Wrapped Presents". They look like little perfectly wrapped Christmas boxes, which I think is really cute. This design can be worn for various occasions, just change your colours!

Wrapped Present Nails.

I used three colours for this one:
220 Celeb City - Sally Hensen Hard as Nails Xtream wear, metallic silver.
Rebel Red - BYS, simple red crelly.
Fatal Attraction - BYS, lime green jelly.

Simple simple for this one. I started with two coats of Celeb City. Using two pieces of striping tape, I crossed them over each other in a different place for each nail to form a cross. Once the tape was secure, I applied one coat of Rebel Red to three of my nails, and quickly removed the tape. For my accent nail, I used two coats of Fatal Attraction due to the sheerness of it. I waited about 10 minutes for the first coat to dry, added the second and removed the tape. Then once all nails were totally dry, I used a sandwich bag to hold a blob of Celeb city and used my dotting tool to make the bows. I made two small teardrops on either side of one line, then drew two small diagonal lines leading away from the tears. Once the tear drops were relatively dry, I went back to my dotting tool with the Rebel Red and Fatal Attraction, and added one small dot inside the teardrops. Lastly, I used my fave Big Shiny Top Coat to seal it all and I was done!


Fabulous, quick and festive! 

Close up, so you can see more of the details. 

Another, just for fun.

Close up of the Rebel Red.

I like the way this looks with the crelly/jellies. The glitters from Celeb City poke through just enough to add some depth to it. I would love to try this out with some pastels for a birthday. 

What do you think? Would you try this? What colours would you use?

Let me know!

Thanks for stopping by!

Christmas Nail Art Design - Skittles!

Hello Lovelies!

As you all know, the holiday season is upon us! Therefore, I have decided to do some Christmas inspired nails. I didn't want to do just one simple design, so I decided to do skittle nails.

I'm not much for the traditional Christmas stuff and we don't usually get snow here in Australia, so I tried my best to do something that was Christmas like without being too crazy.

I tried out a couple of new things today to achieve this. I did some dry marbling and used nail vinyls for the very first time, which is really cool because I see so many people doing both of these and I've been wanting to try them out. 

Behold, the Christmas Skittle nail art:

Okay, so this is the set on the whole. I also did my thumb nail in the same gold featured on my ring finger.

These are the feature nails. I used the same three colours throughout the design. We have:

Hidden Treasure - BYS gold shimmer.
Roller Coaster - BYS green creme
Red Carpet - BYS red shimmer

I love these colours together. The green being a creme, I think adds to the depth of this mani.

Now for the breakdown:

Three coloured dry marble.

This is, as I mentioned earlier, the first time I tried this technique... and you know what? I love it! I love the way the colours melt into each other. To me it gives the appearance of an intricate stone, like an opal. I'm very happy with this nail and I will be doing more of these! 

I used Red Carpet as my base colour. Sally Henson's Big Peel Off Base Coat was used around my nail to protect my skin (as you can see from the small chunk missing, it got onto my nail and picked some of it up during the clean up process). I grabbed my stamper and added about three varying sized blobs of each colour polish in the center and quickly dabbed it onto my nail. I continued to dab a few more times so the colours would mix, as well as making sure the nail was covered. Finished off with Sally Henson's Big Shiny Top Coat, and there you have it! A unique Christmas nail art that took about 30 seconds. 

Reindeer nail vinyls.

This is a really easy design, all I had to do was pick my colours! I purchased some nail vinyls online recently and I got them last week, which was perfect because I've been thinking about these nails for the last week or two. I used two coats of Roller Coaster for the base, added Sally Henson's Big Shiny Top Coat so the vinyl wouldn't pull up what was underneath. I used my tweezers to remove the vinyl from the sheet and place it on the nail. I pressed it down lightly as to not rip up the rest of the nail with it. I used a heavy amount of Hidden Treasure to cover the design and quickly removed the vinyl. Once the design was dry I added another layer of top coat, and did the last two steps twice more. I did re-use the same vinyl. I've heard some people say it can be done and others say it can't be done, so I decided to try it out for myself. I would probably only use them once in future. I am very happy with the first one I did (center)... the others, not so much. I used a dotting tool to fix up some mistakes and then finished off with my shiny top coat.

And last but not least:

Tinsel & baubles.

This one is pretty basic, I used two coats of Hidden Treasure for my base. I used a small dotting tool to make the tinsel lines using Roller Coaster, which added a little more texture then a striping brush. I took the same dotting tool with Red Carpet to make the baubles, and finished off with a shiny top coat. 

And that's it! All in all this was a pretty quick mani. The longest part was waiting for the top coat to dry, which is expected because I don't have a quick dry yet. I may even do another set... I have so many ideas, I've got to let them out! 

Have you done Christmas nails? Feel free to leave a link in the comments so I can check them out!

Thanks for stopping by! 

Essie Blossom Dandy Spring 2015 Dry Brush

Howdy y'all!

Today I'm gonna share with you the first nail art that spiked my obsession. This is not the first one I've ever done, but the first one that turned into a snow ball effect. Admittedly, I have done this technique so many times because I love it. It's quick, easy, super cute and you can do so much with it! 

It's the dry brush technique. So basically, you choose your base colour, for me, its usually white, because what doesn't go with white? Then you grab your second colour and wipe off as much of the polish as you can, effectively making the brush "dry", and just swipe the brush across your nail in any way you see fit. The results are sort of a distressed abstract look. You can use as many colours as you like, but I just did the one this time. If you check out my last post there's a three toned version that I also love.

For this design I used BYS French White and Essie Blossom Dandy. I think these colours pair well together. At the time it was the middle of winter and we were receiving an unusual amount of rain, so I wanted to do something a to match those winter vibes, whilst still adding a splash of colour. Honestly this is still one of my favorite designs to date. It just wears so well and I could not stop looking at them!

Now I know my gap is HUGE and very uneven and inconsistent, but this was actually the first time I'd done it. I was getting sick of my polish chipping so easily, and only lasting a day or two, so I did some research which lead to the gap (as well as some other really useful tips) This will get slightly better over time, and then slightly worse again haha.

I know it's a little over done, but I totally understand why, its so awesome! I love it. I feel I need to get a little more adventurous with this one. Watch this space!

What are your thoughts on this technique? Have you done it before? Let me know!

Thanks for stopping by!

G'Day y'all & Welcome to the AustraNAILian!

My name's Sophie and as you can probably tell from my blog name, I'm Australian and I love nail art.

I'm forever researching nail related things online, only to find they're either American or Canadian, which makes it bloody hard to get my hands on some of the things I want. So I decided to make my own blog, with products that are available to Australian's that are not going to take 6 weeks in shipping or cost my first born child.

Now, bare with me children, as I have not long been doing nail art, despite always loving it, I've only recently decided to do all the really intricate designs that I've seen before. So to get started, let me chuck in some older nail art that I somehow managed to pull off.

This was my first attempt at the dry brush technique. I actually really loved these nails and got so many compliments. Heaps of women thought they were Frozen inspired. They were not. I just happened to like these colours. (Spoiler alert, these colours will be featured a lot).

These are one my first intricate designs. As you can see, I tried a sponge gradient, but because I used an actual sponge, like the kind you'd do the dishes with, they ended up being very spacey and not opaque enough. Sad face. They also took me 3 day! As you can probably tell from the wear on the tips. But all in all, I loved them!

Now here is one of my favorite techniques so far! This is a wicked splatter technique created by using a straw. I obviously didn't bother cleaning up properly before taking this shot, but I believe it was a lot worse before this. It is a very messy technique, but its very worth it. I loved the results of this and the best part is, they will NEVER look the same!

Unfortunately at this time I didn't know much about nail art. But, there is hope! Looking back on these images, I actually get frustrated with myself because of things I know now. So you've got some nice designs to look forward to. Or at least, I think they're nice.

That's all I've got for you today. I have a few back logged images of my designs, so hang in there my friend, more nail magic coming soon!

Thanks for stopping by!