New Year, new mani techniques for Polish Days! Splatter + Border

Hi everyone. Man, I was gone a whole week. I'm sorry! I have had the flu since last Wednesday, and then today some personal things came up that have knocked me off the track again. Might be a while until I'm full-strength again, I hope you all can bear with me. :)

Luckily, doing my nails is a little reprieve from the storms that far too often rock our lives' precious little boats. Plus, it's time for another edition of Polish Days, and I had to put in my contribution as I've had it in mind for so long. The prompt is as follows:

January is all about new starts, resolutions and starting over for most people. Personally I’ve never made a resolution for the new year – I won’t stick to it so why bother!
When it comes to polish though I’m always keen to try something new, so the theme for January is to try something you’ve never done before, pull out an untried polish you just haven’t gotten around to trying, or a technique you’ve been too scared to give a go. It’s not about having the most perfect finish (but props to you if you nail it first time!) maybe it’s just a technique you’ve never blogged about but have been perfecting in secret. Whatever you chose, challenge yourself a little or even try something out of your comfort zone (for me this would be nudes!).

I took this prompt to heart and did things in several new ways--two new polishes *and* two new (to me) techniques!

splatter and border in the same mani? oh no she didn't. (yes, the small finger smeared a little when I topcoated. shhh. you saw nothing.)

The base colour is one of the new polishes--it's Orly Blue Collar, and it's a nice creamy, slightly dusty blue that leans a bit aqua-ish. If I had to compare it to a Crayola crayon, it'd be cerulean.

I thought orange and yellow would be fun contrasting colours on top of that, so I chose OPI A Roll In The Hague (perfect creamy pumpkiny orange, and the second new polish I hadn't tried yet! Another from the gorgeous Holland collection) and Sinful Colors Neon Melon (the neon yellow... for those with no process-of-elimination powers, hehe).

I had not tried these techniques before. The splatter... I love the look, but just didn't want to bother with the mess. Border nails I tend to find terribly ugly. However, the dot-border reminds me of old-fashioned marquee signs or makeup-mirrors, and the splatter wasn't as bad to clean up as I expected, so this was a pleasant surprise all around!

no flash, and kind of awkward pose. But I like the sharp definition of the splatters on this shot. So 80's-esque.

Posing with the bottle, because erm, that's what all the cool bloggers do?

And last, a shot with my phone, because I like how closely it matches the case :D Makes me want to splatter-decorate it... hmmm...

Thanks again to "Polly", the mastermind behind Polish Days, for putting these things together. Always so fun, and I really like how this made me do something new and different. Click the link for the jump below to see the other awesome entries! xoxo