Winter Wonderland: Ombré Tutorial

I know I said my next post was going to be an alternative to the French tip manicure...but then it snowed and everything looked so beautiful and I couldn't resist creating a Winter Wonderland design (inspried by this cutepolish Disney tutorial). Here's a picture of my "Narnia"; I went for a walk in the snow on my lunch break at work, but felt like I'd gone to another world!

This snow scene design also gives me the opportunity to talk about other types of ombré designs that you can try.

So back to my Winter Wonderland...start by preparing your nails, applying a base coat, and two coats of a light blue. I used Barry M's "Blueberry" from their Gelly range. Ideally, I'd use something lighter, more of a pastel blue, but I didn't have anything to hand.

Then use glitter nail varnishes to layer up your sparlinking snow, from the cuticles to the tips. I used a thin layer of a silver glitter with small pieces (namely E.L.F "Glitter Glam"):

...followed by a sliver glitter with larger pieces: No. 7, "Glitterball":

...and finally Nails Inc. "Devonshire Street", which has a silvery base colour with a purply tone too:

So, I did the blue as my base, then a thin coat of the E.L.F right to the cuticle, then the No. 7 from about a third of the way up to the tip, then the Nails Inc. from two-thirds up to the tip and finally I ran the Nails Inc. just across the tip once more.

As a feature nail, on my ring finger, I used a silver colour base (Nails Inc. "Cambridge Terrace"), and covered it with the No. 7 "Glitterball" I used on the rest of my nails. I find that putting a glitter of the same colour on top of a base gives the colour an extra dimension.

And, once I've finished it off with a top coat, my Winter Wonderland is complete!

Other variations are black base with a silver glitter, for a night-time snow scene, or a deep navy blue, with gold glitter for a starry night, but can really do any colours you like with this same technique!

I promised other ombré ideas - so, instead of doing the fade across one nail, you could try fading across all of your nails. To do this, you'll need 5 (or 10, if you're brave) different shades of the same colour. Then, starting on either your little finger or your thumb, paint the lightest colour and moving across your hand increase the shade on each finger. I've done this with pinks (as shown below) and greens and well as from white to black (or "5 shades of grey", you could say) but would be great with blues, silver through to gold, yellow to orange or with purples. What I would say is that you should plan this before you do it...paint the colours, in order, on paper or card before you paint them on your nails: the colour you see through the bottle isn't always the colour it looks when painted!

The colours I used (from light to dark) are:

Nails Inc "Elizabeth Street"
Barry M "Bright Pink"
Avon "Viva Pink"
No. 7 "Perky"
Nails Inc "Piccadilly Circus"



Another idea is to use a makeup spongue to create an ombré fading effect going up your nails (rather than using glitter as I did in my tutorial). I've not quite perfected this yet but there's a really great tutorial by pixiepolish and with a bit of practice, you too could get this great effect.

(Design by pixiepolish)

Enjoy creating your own Narnia (let me know how you get on in the comments) and I promise I'll do my alternative French tips tutorial next!