It's birthday time again at the digital dozen. Unfortunately I don't always get the time to squeeze in an extra mani in the month for the birthday girls, but this month I did.  This is such a great image and I was really inspired by it and ended up wearing this mani for 5 days!

So Happy Birthday to the Digital Dozen July babes, Tracy from Olivia Jade Nails and RoseLynn from Manicured & Marvelous.

For my mani, I started with a white base. I used my absolute favourite white polish, JOSS Will Not. It is the perfect one coat white.  I then did a smoosh mani using a few of the Pretty Serious Pastel Pets polishes and a few of the Grace-full Fruit Salad polishes. 

The stamp is off a Messy Mansion plate (MM13)with various Arabian themed images.  This one also has silhouetted buildings at the bottom, but I was able to keep them off my nails by using a tiny bit of sticky tape on the little bits that did show. If my nails were any longer this wouldn't have worked.

Two swatches in two day, what's going on...

Here is a swatch of another polish that I picked up at Aussie Indie Con.  This is Pretty Serious, Wish you were beer.

Oh how I wish I was able to photograph this to look like it does in its natural, glorious, real life form. It's so much sparklier and amazing.  It reminds me of OPI Golden Eye, but with holo and a more jelly finish.  I generally go for much cooler toned golds, and really this is more of an amber shade, but wow, I do love it.  This is a convention exclusive polish, but I believe there are still a few bottle available on the Pretty Serious website.

I did two coats for this swatch and a thick coat of Seche Vite top coat. 

It's been forever since I did swatching.  Man, that is a lot of work. Applying polish, photographing it and removing it all in about 10-15 minutes.  I got to the point where I could do 5-6 polishes in an hour.  Then you had to do the image editing to crop the pictures and make them all look uniform and colour correct.  But every now and then, I do love to show a swatch and today is one of those days.

I have two polishes to show you that were in the VIP bag at Aussie Indie Con.  They are both JOSS polishes, which I have a huge passion for.

First up is Black Magic Holo.  As you can see it's a black polish with a strong holo flame. Opactiy is great and you get full coverage with two coats and top coat doesn't effect the holoness.

Let me start this post with an apology to two Aussie stockists for my shitty turn around time in showing the products here today. It's taken me 2-3 months to get this post done, despite the fact that I did these manis 2-3 months ago.  I also feel pretty shitty that I'm combining two products from two different stockists into these two manis, but then again, they are both great stamping products and sharing the information in one post probably makes the most sense for you readers.

So lets get into it.  For these manis I tried out two of the Clear Jelly Stamper stamping polishes.   #32 Blue and #28 Pretty Penny.  They are both nicely pigmented with a very strong shimmer.  Here I have stamped Blue over Picture Polish Swagger and below I have stamped Pretty Penny over Pretty Serious Peachie Poo. I got these stamping polishes from Mega Nail Supplies, who are the Australian suppliers for Clear Jelly Stamper.  My voucher for 15% off , which is valid for her entire range, include all the Clear Jelly Stamper products is - 15MORE

Now to the stamping plate that I used.  These two images are from the Lina Feeling Shapely 09 plate. I absolutely love the images on this plate, particularly all the options for these stamped gradients of sort.  There are lots of designs that can be used for reverse stamping and I'm a big fan of all the geometric design so the plate.  I did have some troubles using shimmer stamping polishes with some of the very fine lines on this plate.  They were just too fine to get the shimmer particles into and therefore they didn't pick up onto the stamper. For those ones I found stamping with Mundo de Unas worked best. I have another mani coming (one day) where I can show the resutls. I got this plate from Hit the Bottle.

#32 Blue over Picture Polish Swagger

Whilst at Aussie indie con last month, I managed to restrain myself and only buy a select few polishes.  This was in fact the only entire collection that I got.  I'm such a sucker for a nice coordinating creme collection, even though I have already mixed up my own rainbow colours that are similar to these, I couldn't pass them up. 

The Grace-ful Fruit Salad collection is a set of 7 colours that all compliment each other so nicely that I just love using them all together in nail art.  I've combined some swatches with a watermarble here. As you can see they watermarble perfectly.  That is because they meet just the right criteria for a nice watermarbling polish, nice new polishes that are thin and smooth and well pigmented.  I used two coats of each color for each of the swatch finger, and the water marble is over a white base. 

Raspberry

Today's post, like the rest of the week, was all about where the polish was from. In this case, Russia, and therefore in the Asian continent. Yet I ended up doing an Egyptian theme, so you could also say that this mani represents the African continent.

This mani was so amazing, and I'm really pissed at myself. You see I created this beautiful design with a light blue to yellow gradient as the background. I then used the Bow thermal polishes to create a dark sunset gradient over the top. Then I only remembered to photograph it in the warm state, were you can't even see the Bow thermal top coats except for the holo sparkles.

The only thing I did remember to do was a transition video. So that's the only way you will get to see the cold state.

Day four and I've made it to the European continent today. I pulled out some of my aEngland polish which I have not wore for years.  These polishes were so popular then they first come out, but I don't think I've bought any new ones for ages.  What I love is that they have a soft holo sheen,  but they are generally one coaters.

The two aEngland polished I used were Dragon and And the moonbeams.  I was inspired by the name of the polish, and by the fact that Game of Thrones returns on Monday at 11.00am (which is the same time as the USA). I free hand painted the dragon eye. I figured it was about time I did something freehand for the Digital Dozen this month.  The stamping plate I used is the dragon plate from Messy Mansion for the scales.

I applied OPI matte top coat to the entire mani cause dragons aren't shiny to me, although this did dull the holo effect.  I added a bit of regular top coat onto the eye again to make it glossy, and it also really made it pop!

Did you know that nearly a month ago I attended Aussie Indie Con. I'm so sorry that I never got around to doing a wrap up post about it because it was a fantastic day and I met so many Aussie indie enthusiasts.  Sadly I was too busy having fun that I didn't take any photos. 

One of the girls I met was Tracy from Olivia Jade Nails. We didn't take a selfie photo, but we did take a nails photo. Only problem was that it was at the end of the day and I had been doing water marbling demos and workshops, so my nails were a random mess of various colour combos in various water marble patterns.  Another person I met was Margaret from @loveslacquer who was travelling with Tracy.  The reason I mention both those ladies is because Tracy is part of the Digital Dozen of course, and Margaret inspired these nails. At Aussie indie con I talked about the fact that I hadn't done a circular marble as I had never got them to work nicely. Margaret showed me a red, black and white circular marble she had done back in May last year and it inspired me.

It's so weird attending nail meet ups like that, because you generally don't recognise anyone's face. But someone had pointed out to me who Tracy and Margaret were, quietly sitting at the side of the room. I wandered over to them and said their names and they were both looking at me like 'yeah, and who are you, we have no idea and it's freaking us our that you know who we are'. Then I said 'I'm Cathy'. Then they both jumped up and we all hugged and we started chatting like we were besties.

Today's water marble uses one of my favourite brands for water marbling, US based Pipedream polish. Which covers off North America in our trip around the world via 5 continents.

I used all five polishes from the Street Carnival collection that I managed to pick up in a blog sale last year.  On my right hand I had most of the marbles centered on my nail, except one where I didn't line it up as well and ended up with the side of the marble and not the centre. I actually loved that one the most and decided to do that on my left hand.  

Let me reiterate that, because so many people at my demos and workshop at Aussie indie Con asked me. Yes, I do in fact marble both my hands. LOL!

Today's trip around the world via 5 continents takes us to South America.  I has been absolutely ages since I pulled out some of my polishes from Brazil. There's nothing like a nail art challenge to get you back into the depths of your nail polish stash.

The brands I used for this mani were Esmaltes 5cinco Arco Iris, which is a multicoloured flake polish. I applied it over white, so it was actually really hard to see any of the iridescent flashes. Vermelho Pink Pop which is a hot pink jelly polish with lots of fine hot pink holo glitter.  I used stamped with Mundo de Unas, which I believe is a Mexican brand. In keeping with the whole South American continent, I also made the stamping decals using a DRK nail plate, which is a Brazilian stamping plate company.