Black & White Butterflies

I was trying out several different designs to do for Berry Polished's Black and White Nail Art Competition. As the name suggests you can enter a design but only use black and white nail polish. One of the designs I decided to try was black and white butterflies.

I started off with a Ulta3 Base Coat. I then applied 2 coats of Ulta3 Lily White to all nails but my thumb and ring finger. For those I applied one coat of BYS Black Satin. Once dry I used Black Satin and a small nail art brush to drawn butterfly wings on my index, middle and pinkie fingers and then a small dotting tool and Lily White to draw dots. Then for my ring finger I used Lily White for the wings and Black Satin for the dots.

I wanted to do something different on my thumb so I stamped with the flower design from M26 and the butterfly design from M20 in Konad Special Polish White.

Butterfly Design from M20 (Image from ICNA)

Flower Design from M26 (Image from ICNA)

Finally I topped it all off with Ulta3 top coat. Ooh and then I smudged a nail which I tried to fix :'( Lol and I broke both sides off my thumbs!! :'''''''(

But here are the photos anyway :)

Black & White Butterflies in Artificial Light

Black & White Butterflies in Natural Light

Black & White Butterflies in Natural Light

Black & White Butterflies in the Shade

Black & White Butterflies in the Shade

I don't like how this turned out. My white wasn't opaque enough against my black and I was too impatient to let everything dry completely between each step. I think these butterflies look better on longer nails where I can make the outline of wings thicker so the dots fit on better.

Autumn Leaves

Since we are supposed to be in Autumn (anyone else still dealing with high temperatures? O_o) I got the idea in my head to do some Autumn leaves on my previous manicure. It was the picture below from Konad Stamping Nail Art that inspired my design, of course my nails are NOWHERE near THAT long!!

Konad Design from KONAD

So with that in mind I scoured through my Konad plates until I found the design I wanted to use. I used the leaf designs on Konad plate M20.

Konad plate M20 Image from ICNA

I only stamped half the design on each nail alternating either the big leaf or the small leaf. Then I moved onto the next colour and again alternated which leaf I used. I kept doing this with a new colour until there was no room left - so there are fewer colours on y pinkie compared to my thumb. All up I used Konad Special Polish Gold, Yellow, Blue, Light Grey, Dark Purple, Gold Brown and Green for each successive leaf. Lastly I used Konad Special Top Coat to seal my design.

So what did it end up looking like...

      Left Hand

Autumn Leaves in Artificial Light - Left Hand

Autumn Leaves in Artificial Light - Left Hand

Autumn Leaves in Shade/Natural Light - Left Hand

Unfortunately it was overcast the following day so I have no photos in full sunlight.

    Right Hand

Autumn Leaves in Artificial Light - Right Hand

Autumn Leaves in Artificial Light - Right Hand

Autumn Leaves in Shade/Natural Light - Right Hand

I'm happy with how this turned out :) I wanted it to have multicoloured leaves on the brown background and that's exactly how it looks. I also found it useful to see which colours turned up on the brown for when I want to stamp on similar dark colours. My pad of paper had a large amount of mess left over after stamping so many times!!