Four Seasons Blogger Collaboration - Spring Blossom

Hi NaiLovelies!

I hope you all had a fantastic weekend!   

I have a manicure with a difference to show you today.  I have collaborated with three fantastic UK bloggers to bring you four manicures to represent each of the four seasons of the year.

I was lucky to get ‘spring’ as my prompt for this manicure.  I really think I lucked out with this one because apart from summer, spring is most definitely one of my favorite times of the year!

I love how springtime breathes a new lease of life into everything after the bleak winter months have passed.  I am a spring baby, so this is probably one of the reasons why I feel akin to this particular time of the year.  I love the weather as in the UK we tend to have fantastic sunshine in spring and although it is usually accompanied by a somewhat fresh breeze (okay, more like howling wind and lashing rain!) I appreciate that I am not having to navigate my way through the moldy brown leaves of autumn (October/November is not a fun time for me!) or the snow and ice of winter. 

Cherry blossom always comes into bloom like an explosion of beautiful dreamy looking trees which evokes rich childhood memories for me.  To this very day, cherry blossom is my favorite bloom and is pretty much the only flower I like the fragrance of.  I recall ripping sprays of cherry blossom from trees and asking my mum to put them, twigs 'n all into water filled vases around our home (okay, those vases were actually milk bottles but you get the idea!).  This is why I have chosen to create a cherry blossom tree as my nail art for this manicure.

To achieve this manicure I used three coats of IBD Peach Blossom soak off gel polish as a base which applied perfectly, but this manicure could easily be replicated using regular nail polish.  I didn't own any acrylic paints but I knew that they would give the versatility I needed so far as the depth of colours I would need to achieve the overall look on my nails so I purchased a 12 piece set from TK Maxx for £4.99 at the weekend.  Unfortunately, the set didn’t come with a brown but I knew I would be able to make brown by mixing primary colours – I just didn’t know which ones!  After a lightening speed bit of research on Auntie-Google, I discovered that mixing red, blue and yellow together in equal quantities made the perfect brown shade. 

I mixed the brown on a piece of foil and on the same piece of foil I added blobs of white, bright pink, orange and yellow as my palette to make the flowers.  After painting the tree trunk and branches, I added dots of white onto my nails for the petals and then followed this up with tiny pin prick sized dots of the bright pink and orange.  I then continued to build up the layers of flowers across three nails mixing varying amounts of white with the bright colour to add interest and watering down the paints randomly to create texture.

At various stages throughout the application of the flowers, I went back over sections of the branches so there were levels of depth between the flowers and the branches.  I then covered with gel topcoat and to add to the dreaminess of the cherry blossom tree, I applied a coat of Hurt No Living Thing by AEngland to produce a subtle iridescent pink shimmer over the blossom....

This is the first time I have ever drawn/painted on my nails using them as a canvass for nail art so I was a little nervous about this project….and then showing it to you all.  Truth be told, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing but I knew how I wanted it to look and I am happy that I managed to achieve what I set out to do.     

I am really excited about this manicure and happy to be collaborating with these excellent nail artists on this blogger collaboration:

Summer - Lisa – Starfish Nails
Autumn - AJ – Nail Lacquer UK

Winter  - Elicia – Delicate Nails

Please use the links above to visit their blogs to check out their fab manicures for the four seasons collaboration and don't forget to tell them what you think of their excellent work.

Ciao 4 Now