Fingertiptastic: Wiki'd Nail Challenge

So, last week saw the start of a 10 week challenge called Wiki'd Nail Challenge. Each week there is a random prompt taken from Wikipedia and this week the prompt is Water Babies

Here's the Wikipedia definition

The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby is a children's novel by the Reverend Charles Kingsley, written 1862-63.

I'm ashamed to say I've never read this classic tale and so had to Google some images to try and get some inspiration for the mani. So I googled, then googled again and then googled some more,but my creative juices just weren't flowing!!! I was beginning to panic a bit so decided to think outside the box.

This picture caught my eye, mainly because of the colours used but also because of the quote at the bottom by the main character Tom (which just happens to be my eldest sons name!!!)

I have created lots of blue based manis recently so wanted to avoid blue and thought the colours in this photo would work well in a mani.

My first thought was to create a gradient, but again, I have done a lot of these recently (and I hate the clean up part!!!) Then I remembered seeing a mani created using sharpies over a white "undercoat"

I reached for my son's pencil case and selected 6 sharpies that I thought would work well for the colour scheme I was trying to recreate.

Next, I painted a white undercoat using Rimmel London White Hot Love. Unfortunately, I was so keen to start colouring on my nails that I forgot to take a photo - but in good "Blue Peter" style - here's one I did earlier!!!

The next stage in the process was to get a small bowl and colour directly onto it with the sharpie (please excuse my naked nails on my right hand!!!)

Once the colour is in the bowl, I sprayed it with alcohol spray (I think perfume would probably work too) The alcohol dissolves the ink from the sharpie, allowing it to be picked up with a small nail art brush.

Here's the result of the sharpie mani after a top coat of Glisten and Glow HK Girl. All it needed now was a bit of nail art to resemble the original photo.