Polish Party: Inspired by Another Member - Leopard Half and Half

Hello all,

I am very excited about the theme for this month's Polish Party - Inspired by Another Member!  We vote each month and since setting up our facebook group I have suggested this theme each time for the poll and it has narrowly been out voted by something else.  This month it finally came up on top though - Yay!

The only issue left after getting it through was picking who would be my inspiration.  There are so many fabulous ladies in the group who create such amazing nail art. so it was always going to be a tough choice.  In the end I decided on a half and half leopard print from Lauren at The Naily Mail.

Here's my version...

And here's Lauren's original design...



I had a shortlist of three designs including a galaxy manicure, a fish tail/plaited design with glitter, and this one. Lauren does gorgeous half and half manicures and I think it looks really effective which is what made me really want to try it out.  I love the gold she has used here, but I have done subtle coloured or realistic animal print nails before so I wanted to go really out there with a bright bold colour (If you followed the link above you will have seen Lauren's bright pink zebra nails, which were a source of more inspiration to do the animal print in a different colour).

As you can see I haven't copied the design like for like because the idea was to take inspiration and run with that rather than recreated the exact same nail art.  On my nails, the leopard print is towards the littler finger side on each hand so they are a mirrored effect.

I chose to use China Glaza Purple Panic for my main colour.  I have used this before and it looked more pink than purple, but now I can see more of the purple in it.  This is such a brilliant colour and China Glaze polishes are beautiful to work with.  The apply so smoothly.  Purple Panic dries to a semi matte finish, but I have added shine with my regular Sally Hansen Ista-Dri top coat.

To create my leopard print nails I used Models Own Snow white as my base.  One that had dried I used the nail tape from their new Nail Art Tool Kit (review of that coming soon), to create a neat line down the middle of my nail.  I painted half with Purple Panic and peeled the tape away before it had dried.  Then using the larger dotting tool from the Models Own kit (there's two double ended ones!), I added rough dots for the main spots.  Once these were dry I used the other end of the dotting tool dipped into a bit of Revlon Knockout.  To finish of the spots I use little 'c' shapes around the spot to frame them, rather than outline them.  Finally I used my Barry M nail art pen in black to add a row of tiny dots down the middle of the half and half colours.

I love that Lauren's original is fairly delicate with smaller leopard sopts and mine looks slightly cartoon like with larger bright spoldgy spots.  I hope I did a good job following my inspiration - what do you think?

Don't forget to take a look at who the other lovely ladies were inspired by

An InLinkz Link-up