I've made it to day 5 of the Mythical Creatures week, and for my final mani I really pushed myself for a full freehand design.  Like many of the other manis this week, I chose dragons as a prompt, but my dragons are a little bit different.

My daughters current favourite show is Dreamworks Dragons, which all started with the How to Train Your Dragon movie, and then followed with 8 seasons and another movie.  She binge watched season six on Netflix last weekend and is now busting for the third movie to come out. Although I am a bit worried it's going to be a bit of a sad ending with Hiccup and Toothless both going their different ways. 

Anyway, I painted four of the main five dragons here. I could pretend that I painted Barf and Belch on my thumb, but we all know I secretly only painted four nails just to post here.!

So here they all are, Toothless, Stormfly, Hookfang and Meatlug, all in their freehand painted glory.

Day 4 and I've started to do a little freehand today, on my way to tomorrow which is all freehand work!  Today's mythical creature is the Demogorgon.

I only recently watched Stranger Things. Well it was in mid December last year, but that is still pretty recent. I really loved the two series and I'm looking forward to season three next year some time I'm guessing.

For this mani I started with a black to white gradient. I then stamped some bare looking trees in grey and black and added some tiny white dots to represent the floaty white stuff that was always around in the upside down.  I then attempted to paint the open mouth of the demogorgon. I think it looks a bits more like a flower, but if you squint your eyes a little you can pretend those white dots are it's sharp teeth.

Day 3 and today we have the Phoenix. When I think of a Phoenix, I always think of Fawkes from Harry Potter.  

I created a holo gradient using two Anna Gorelova polishes from Dance Legend. These are front the Anna Gorelova Summer collection from last year and the two colours are 26 (yellow) and 31 (orange/red). For a bit of extra bling I sponged on a for bright yellow holo glitters.

Stamping is from Messy Mansion plate MM14, which has a range of bird themed images on it.

Argh - I did a thing!  Don't worry I didn't go get acrylics or gel, I just put on some long stick on nails an painted them.  All I can say is how to girls with long nails like this even function! The truth is I could barely wear these for 30 mins.

Why did I do this you ask? Well I had seen so many amazing unicorn horn gel nails on instagram, but they were always done on long coffin or stiletto shaped nails. A unicorn horn was always going to look a little silly on my shorter square nails.

In the end I ended up doing a specific unicorn, Princess Cadance from My Little Pony. I have a whole sheet of MLP stickers for my daughter, but they are pretty sucky and don't stick very well.  Under the holo unicorn horn nail is actually bright pink, as Cadance's horn is pink, but that holo is so blinding it's hard to see the pink tint behind it.

It's another Digital Dozen week already, and this weeks prompt is pretty fun. Mythical Creatures!  I've actually got all my mani's already painted. I've done some classic 'easy' mythical creatures, plus I've mixed in some more random, less thought of creatures too. Add, to bring my achievement level up to 100, I've done a few with free hand designs as well. So it looks like you are in for a good week of nail art.

I'm starting with a classic mythical creature, by doing some mermaid scales. Mermaid is just too easy to go past for this prompt. A bit of a gradient, some flakes to add some scaly reflections and a scaled stamping plate.  I was rather pleased with myself for not going with the traditional black stamping for once. I always seem to go for black or white, so it was nice to use the muted grey colour this time.

My base for this mani was two of the Sally Hansen Lustre Shine from 2013.  The flakie polish is a blue to green one from Inglot, which is almost lost in all the photos, except the macro, but it did throw off some extra shine.

Has it really be two weeks since I last posted? Well yes, apparently it has. Life has been busy with the usual stuff. Kids back to school for a new year, the Weetbix TRYathalon, school swimming carnivals, squad swimming, weekend tennis, you know the usual stuff that rolls on week after week.

This fortnights prompt for the 26 Great nail art ideas is 'love, but no pink or red'.  I've got to say, these too a while to paint, about two hours for all 10 fingers, so it's just lucky that the Dance Legend Bi top coat is still working awesome for me, so I got a full week out of these.

I painted a different combo gradient on every nail using five of the Pipe Dream polish A Night in Vegas Cremes. I then did reverse stamping on five different stamper heads at a time, with the same five shades I used for the gradient.  Now I know that the polish looks a little pink on my ring and pinky fingers, but they truely are purple and orange shades.

I finally remembered to paint my nails with one of the prompt themes for the 26 Great Nail Art Ideas Challenge, before I saw other participants nails and though, oh that's right that was a cool theme that I wanted to participate in.  The prompt this fortnight is neon and black, which in my opinion is one of the best combos every.  Sadly it's also one of the most difficult combos to photograph ever too.

You wouldn't believe it, but I did in fact use three neon shades for that gradient. In real life the middle neon orange shade is so bright, but in these photos it just looks like a little bit of pink and lots of yellow. I pulled out a bunch of older Orly neon shades for this, they really have some good ones and it was nice to grab something I hadn't worn in ages.

I used a new stamping plate too. This butterfly image is from Kelly Negri Plate KN28, which I got from DRK nails. Their store is closed at the moment, but I'll leave the link here as it will work when they open up again.  I love this image on the plate, with all the small butterflies leaving the negative space of the larger butterfly.