A-England St. George and Ascalon

Continuing on with my nail art ideas for short nail series, I bring you diagonally color blocked nails! For this look, I used a coat of St. George (the deep green), allowed it to dry completely, then used tape to block off half of each nail.  Then, I painted over the nail & tape, peeled of the tape, and tada! After my nails were dry, I finished with top coat.

It would actually make more sense to do the lighter color as the base, and the darker color on top, but I was painting over a day-old manicure; you can see that I have a slight chip.  I also haven’t cleaned up in this photo – I’m not very good at cleaning up my manicures yet, so sometimes I just skip the cleanup step entirely and let time / handwashing take care of it, as I did for this one.  I could, of course, photograph them later – I’m still wearing this one, and there is no longer any polish on my cuticles – but it has an additional chip (I’m very hard on my hands and also forgot basecoat; A-England polish seems to be of excellent quality).

It’s been a while since the last installment of my nail art ideas for short nails series, but I have a great design and a tutorial for you today! As I’ve mentioned before, vertical stripes on the nail are lengthening, so if you’d like to create the illusion of length on your short nails, vertical stripes are a great way to go.

There are a lot of different ways to do vertical stripes – you could freehand them with a small nail brush,  use regular tape, or use striping tape – which is what I did.  It was quite time consuming, but very easy, and I think it turned out very well!

First, paint your nails a base color – I used a medium grey. I actually painted my nails in Sephora, so I used a color I don’t own; Dior Gris Montaigne 707.  Make sure to let it dry completely – this might take an hour or more. I waited overnight.

Then, apply the striping tape in stripes vertically accross the nail. I found it easiest to do two nails, wait for them to dry, then do two more. This is the time consuming part – I found it really hard to get the strips straight on the nail, and not angled.

Then, paint the nail with a one-coat nail polish (a polish that is opaque in one coat). I used American Apparel Hassid, which is a fantastic one-coat black.

Another nail art idea that works really well for short nails is water marble.  Here, you see my second try – my first try turned out so badly that I had to remove it right away.

If you’ve never tried to water marble your nails before, don’t be afraid – it’s really quite simple. Just set aside an hour, and follow Chloe’s excellent tutorial.  Here, I used Revlon Carbonite and Revlon Copper Penny. You’ll find that some nail polishes work better than others for this technique – both of these worked beautifully.

Have you tried water marbling your nails? Would you?

Newspaper nails were all over tumblr a few months ago, but I still love them. While you can do newspaper nails on either short or long nails, my own aesthetic preference is for short newspaper nails – I just think it looks better.

 Here, I’ve used Zoya Shay as a base, and the Los Angeles Times on top 🙂

Newspaper nails are really simple to do; you apply your base coat and nail polish like normal. You can use any color as a base – it just needs to be light enough for the lettering to show up. Once your normal polish is dry, you dip a torn piece of newsprint into alcohol (rubbing alcohol would probably work; I had vodka handy, so I used that.) Press it against your nail firmly, leave for 2-3 seconds, and peel off. Do you whole hand, wait for it to dry completely, then apply topcoat.  Ta-da! Newspaper nails!