Look at me doing two posts in two days.  Don't get used to it ok! I just needed to squeeze in this Digital Dozen December Birthday mani before the end of the month.  As my life was so busy, and I was hardly on Facebook, I didn't even get around to contributing to the selection of the inspiration image for my birthday month, but it certainly didn't matter, cause the inspiration image chosen was just adorable.  

I didn't go for a perfectly literal interpretation, instead I used these Neko Atsume water decals that I bought from the Born Pretty Store months ago.  With some added free hand hearts, music notes, and similar colour tones, it ended up feeling pretty accurate to the inspiration picture.

My base polish for this is the reborn version of Picture Polish Summer. I love this new version of summer so much more than the original. The colour is very similar being a peach coral shade, but the new version loses the holo hex glitter, adds gold shimmer (yay) and seems to have more concentrated holo flakes. A big improvement for me, an one that means I will wear this polish much more often.  It kind of reminds me of a coral version of Picture Polish Majesty.

Happy Birthday to the other Digital Dozen girls born in December, Kristi and Kerry.

Hello, is anyone there? Is this thing still on?  Once again it's been a while. The last four weeks has just been an absolute blur of life.  My birthday, a driving trip to Queensland for two weeks (which is 12 hours each way) plus of course Christmas.

I have of course been painting my nails the whole time, and usually with some sort of quick and easy nail art, so I will endeavor to edit those photos and get them up on Instagram and the blog, even if they don't come with much commentary.

Unfortunate I missed the December prompt from the Digital Dozen, it was during one of the weeks that I was in Queensland, and I didn't take enough nail art supplies with me to be able to paint the nail art prompts, not that I would have had the time anyway.  Our trip was crazy busy doing theme parks, water parks, beaches and roller coasters for me to have any time to paint serious nail art.  But I will be back with the January prompt too keep me on some sort of regular blogging schedule.

Before writing up this blog post, I did a quick review of my Christmas blog from 2016.  It was titled, Lisfranc, polish hauls and Christmas 2016.  This time last year I was recovering from my Lisfranc foot surgery of having the plates and tightrope inserted into my foot. I had some complications after that surgery where my surgery wound spit open and it took months to heal.  In March I had the second surgery to remove the metal plates (but keeping the tightrope permanently). The surgeon also did a scar revision to remove as much of the horrible purple scar that was left of my foot after the previous wound healed.  Here is a photo of my foot now.  It still swells up when I've been walking around a lot, and the purple scar is still visible, although much narrower than the original scar.  I'm told I walk with a limp sometimes, but I don't notice and I generally don't have too much ongoing foot pain. But it's never going to be the same again.  Amazing red nail polish on my toes does help though - thank you Lacquistry Redicilious. 

I wore this a while back, when the polish was first released. I was super excited because this polish is a collaboration with Margaret from Loves Lacquer, who I finally got to meet at Aussie Indie Con in June this year.

Haven is a slightly nude toned white crelly polish with a scattered holo finish. Margaret's inspiration for this was the white sandy Whitehaven Beach on the Whitsunday Islands. Australia truly has the best beaches in the world!

I kept my nail art simple for this polish, with some silver swarovski crystals and some silver stamping.

I'm sure you knew this combo was coming. It's quite a legendary combo really. Purple base, layered with Cult Nail Unicorn Puke (or Clairvoyant) and topped with the original Unicorn Pee polish (Clarins 230).  I first saw this combo done by Jen the PolishAholic back in 2011. *Insert sad face cause she isn't blogging anymore*.

You can also layer it the other way around too of course, and put the unicorn pee beneath the flakies, I guess it just depends on how much you want to see the sparkly red/green flash of 230, or the multicoloured shards from the flakies.

Sadly I don't have any HTF purple polishes to finish out this trifecta, so I just went it an excellent one coat purple from Ulta3 called Orchid. 

Who else has these two polishes (or similar), and have you worn this combo? If not, do it now, and link me your blog post or photos in the comments!

Guys, I have 17 draft posts with just my photos added, and zero time or inclination to write up words to go with those posts.  For some, where they are just swatch photos, clearly I don't need to say much, but I've also got some awesome review / comparison posts that I really have to write stuff for, and at the moment that is way too much like real work.

So, today you get a swatch of a polish I've not worn a lot. This is another of my VHTF polishes, Cult Nail Clairvoyant, or Unicorn Puke if you happened to grab one of the first 100 numbered bottles (those ones are even more HTF than this one).  Clairvoyant has a very sheer purple base, and lots of multicolored flakies.  This came onto the market during the first flakie craze of 2011, when so many brands released iridescent flake polishes. But this one was special.  

Now it's really probably not designed to be worn this way, cause it took five God damn coats to achieve opacity.  Yes, I patiently waited for base coat, five coats + two layers of top coat to dry for this. It also looks like a bit of shrinkage on the tips, I'm sure there is some, but also think it's because the purple base is so sheer that it doesn't grab the tip much either. I could have sponged on the flakies too, but I wanted the purple base to shine through too.

I think this was only the second time I've worn this polish as a full mani, and the upside of so many coats was that my nails felt bullet proof.  Cult Nails sure had some awesome polishes and it makes me sad that they aren't around anymore, like RBL *sad face*.

Yay it's day 5, and this was a tough prompt this week.  For my last Futuristic design I once again went with a galaxy base (mainly cause I was cheating to save time and was able to leave the rest of my galaxy mani on the other 6 fingers from my Wall-E design).  

My inspiration is the Netflix show called "The 100", which is the latest thing I've been watching on Netflix.  We only got Netflix about 7 months ago, because before that our internet speed was too slow to be able to stream anything.  So I had lots of shows to catch up on. I had in fact never heard about this show, and it was my mum that thought I might like it.  It also has a couple of Australian actors in two of the lead roles.

Over the galaxy base, I painted the 100 which is the main graphic, and on my finger I painted the 'flame', which is a cybernetic implant that looks like a large blue tablet with an infinity symbol on it.

So there we have it for another Digital Dozen week. I'm looking forward to the December prompt, as it has lots of possibilities.

Have you guys picked up on my inspiration this week yet? Yep, I've just stuck with TV shows and Movies to give me the inspiration for what the future might look like.

So continuing with that theme, I have my Day 4 nails, which are the element stones from the movie, The Fifth Element. I really wanted to do something from this movie cause I love this movie, but apparently it's one of those movies that you either love or hate. It has some classic lines, such as 'LeeLoo Multipass", but the favourite line for both my husband and I (and one we say all the time that not many people get) is "Aziz, Light".

I tried to create the stone marble look that the stones in the movie had, and I think it worked out quite well. I then free hand painted on the lines for the different elements, Fire, Earth, Air and Water. 

These nails are super cute!  I just love this movie. It's such a great movie to put on for the kids. I love how it's a quiet movie with such simple communication between Wall-E and Eva.  Although this is a kids movie, it's a good choice for the Futuristic prompt, because I googled it and discovered that the movie is set in the year 2805.

One of my goals this week was trying to think up designs that weren't too much effort to paint across all 10 nails. That's because I haven't had a chance to prepare any mani's in advance and I have to paint each of these designs the night before I post them and wear them as a full mani.  Don't tell anyone, but sometimes I cheat when doing nail art and only paint four nails to photograph, but of course, one can't go to work with just four nails painted!

This design was super easy to do for all ten nails, simply because I just did galaxy nails on all the other fingers.  I only painted Wall-E, Eva and the plant once.

Given that my free hand skills really aren't that great (which is why I opted for the printed decal option on day one), I'm super impressed with how these turned out. Both Wall-E and Eva actually look like Wall-E and Eva. Cool Hey!

Day two of this Futuristic themed week and I bring you a mani inspired by Star Trek. I do like Star Trek and wonder which year us humans will in fact voyage into space Star Trek style. I'd love to think it would be during my lifetime, but I don't think it will be.

I've done Star Trek nails before, just over two year ago, and totally loved them. But this year I had to do a different design, and I love this one just as much. I'm also loving how shiny the Star Trek insignia is, I made a little decal and painted it with the Born Pretty silver mirror polish.

It's another Digital Dozen week, and I'm far from prepared!  I was up in Sydney for work for half of last week and totally lost track of where I needed to be at for my blog posts. I never even got to prepare my mani for the 26 Great nail Art Ideas group, and I really wanted to post those manis, because I loved the prompts!  

This week's theme is Futuristic, which is damn hard. It's not the sort of thing I was able to think up quick designs to paint each night. Because unlike the other Digital Dozen girls who have their mani's done weeks in advance, I'm literally painting my nails one night, and blog posting them the next night.  

One of the first things that popped into my head with the Futuristic theme, was the animated TV series Futurama.  For this nail art I've done a bit of a blended technique of home made and printed water decals, that are then enhanced and coloured with nail polish.  I did this for two reasons. 1. I wanted it to actually look like the characters from Futurama, and secondly, because it was much quicker for me to do like this and I'm all for making my life a little bit easier at the moment.

I started with a blue to purple gradient in the background. I did the decals by printing them on water decal paper and covering with a layer of polish to stop the ink running when they get wet.  Then I applied the decals onto a layer of polish that was on my silicone mat. I then just coloured this in like you would with in regular stamping decal and applied to my nail in the same way.  I finished it off with some Matte Top coat from Cirque to hide the flaws, which mostly did a good job (especially if you don't look to close).

Today in Australia it was Melbourne Cup day, which is just a big horse race where millions of Australia's drop some cash to have their chance to win a few bucks, even though they don't gamble of horse races any other time of the year.  I'm one of those people, but more than anything I just love the way I've now come to choosing my horses for the race.

I started this tradition five years ago, where I chose five horses based on the outfit the jockey was wearing and how well I thought it would translate into nail art. I then put $20 on a boxed trifecta.  That first year I won $1100.  The second year I did it I still managed to pick two of the three first past the post, but the last two years I didn't even pick a single one.

This year I didn't win anything, but I did pick the third place winner, who was wearing the pink with the green dots.  Let's look a the mani I wore, and the jockey silks to see how I transferred them into art.

And the winner, Blah! Boring. There was no way I was going to to two plain blue nails with some little white bands.