Striped with Heart Tips

Hello!

I kind of just threw these nails together last night and they were a combination of ideas. I already had heart-tips in mind as I was considering doing this for my BFF Friday manicure - I went with another idea in the end, but still love how heart tips look - and I wanted to try them out on my new pointy nails - they'd make good hearts, I thought!

I picked these colours inspired by my work - our uniform shirts are a kind of pink/purple stripe pattern, and our logo is a darker pink. I work for a train company and today we lent a train to match.com as they wanted to do a big dating/promo event on board - they called it The Love Train! So because of this being in my mind, I came up with these nails!

I actually loooooooove them! I think outlining the heart made the hearts really stand out and look almost 3D. They took me a while, and I'm happy with the hearts - I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get them looking even/symmetrical and I knew I would just start again with something easier if they went wrong-  luckily that didn't happen.

I started with a base of Prickly Pear (Barry M gelly) - three coats. This isn't my favourite BM gelly polish at all - there are much more gorgeous, stand-out ones (such as Greenberry!!!) ....but I end up using it in so many designs and my bottle has nearly run out! It's very versatile! Once this was fully dry, I added pink stripes with my Barry M nail-art pen. I then drew out the heart using the black nail-art pen. I filled it in with Rhosilli, from the Barry M matte collection. This is almost a perfect match for my train company's logo so I've adopted it as my 'work polish'. I started off using a small nail-art brush to fill in the hearts but then found it was easier to just use the brush out of the bottle! Once THIS was dry I outlined the hearts again in black to neaten them up. I finished with a layer of Sally Hansen insta-dri to seal everything in and add a shine.

I'd be lying if I said these didn't take me ages, but it was partly waiting for each layer to fully dry before adding the next one, and the fact I did the same design on every nail (not just accent nails!)

Here's a picture of Prickly Pear before I added anything else - I need to appreciate this colour more! 

Then some more of the design (two nice ones from my camera, then the rest are ones I took at work with my shirt/the walls/my coffee - woo! Sorry about the scratch on my finger spoiling the pics, it's from a horrible thorn in my garden :-(