Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Lotta's Christmas nails

I spend about 30% of my time making salon nails for customers. The remainder is spent learning Swedish, working towards a Swedish car license, practising nail art techniques and making nail design photographs.

When I started work in Sweden in April 2007, none of my customers wanted nail art just simple french or strengthening of their natural nails. However, 20% of my customers now have nail art on one nail or more.

Lotta is one of my 'ten nail' customers who loves nail art. This time she brought a bottle of nail paint in the color she wanted, and I created these holiday nails for her using a similar color of green gel with glitter and embedded with lace.

Friday, December 19, 2008

Snake skin nails

We were browsing through Karen Millen in Stockholm last week and Bob found a wonderful pair of snake skin shoes - perfect for a nail photograph! The only question was how to create a snake skin effect on nails? After trying a couple of methods, I managed to find a technique that was quick and looked reasonably similar.


Thursday, December 11, 2008

Valentine nails using "putty technique"

When we were at the Beauty 08 exhibition in Stockholm back in October, Bob noticed a very attractive model who had entered in the make-up competition as Marylin Monroe. Realizing the potential for an interesting nail photograph, Bob spoke to her and she was delighted to help us!

Frida Kardeskog is a professional makeup artist who works in the entertainment industry and has worked on CD covers, fashion and TV.

We wanted the theme of the nail photo to be based on Marylin Monroe, and I decided to make some bright red stilettoes with a love theme.

As part of the design I wanted to have a heart shaped hole in each nail. Using an electric file clearly wouldn't work as the bottom of the heart had to be a sharp 'v'. I could have used a small file to create this, but to do ten nails would take a lot of time.

After some discussion with Bob, we came up with a new method that we now call the "Putty Technique". You can see the effect here:




Sunday, December 7, 2008

Blue and gold nails

Jenni Jansson is the model for the blue and gold nails.