My nails today

Models Own, Barry M Top and Base Coat & Miss Sporty.

I decided to do something a little different with my nails today, as I get a bit bored with just one block colour after another. I've been recently looking at loads of posts about gradient style nails, and I've been meaning to try out the technique. I got everything together and started experimenting, but found that I was really useless at mixing the colours together to get the gradient look. I decided to try and fix my messy nails to save me taking all the polish off, but still using the sponge and the two colours. This is what I came up with:

I applied a Barry M basecoat to clean nails, then painted two coats of the Miss Sporty polish and let them dry completely. They were a lot messier than in the picture, as I quickly tidied them up with a cotton bud and some nail varnish remover. All the gradient tutorials I have looked over say to start painting your nails with the lightest of your chosen colours, but because both were quite bold, I decided to go with the purple as the base. 

I then got my small piece of sponge to make the effect on my nails. You can use any kind of sponge, this one is a normal kitchen sponge cut into a little triangle. I dabbed a blob of each colour polish onto separate ends of the sponge, then dabbed the colours across my already painted nails. I started with the blue, and added purple on top to even out the colours. I then let the colours dry completely, and touched up with whatever extra colour was less visible on my nails. I'll warn you now, this can get really messy, so have lots of cotton buds, pads and nail varnish remover handy! When everything was dry, I tidied up my nails again with a cotton bud and some nail varnish remover, and then applied the Barry M top coat. 

And here is the result! Admittedly the picture really isn't that good because of the light and the fact it was taken on my iPhone. You get the effect from the sponge on your nails, with little clumps of the different colours on each nail. Obviously you can use as many colours as you like in your nails - I think multi-coloured smudges would look amazing!