I feel like it's about once a year that I get the idea in my head to do some leopard print nails. They always seem to be a pretty big hit, there's about a million different variations that you can do, and in all honesty they're one of very few hand painted nail designs that I can actually pull off. The inspiration to do this mani came from the polishes I used to do it, mainly two of the polishes from the heroine.nyc Winter Wishes Collection. The polishes I chose aren't necessarily the first pairing that cames to mind for this collection, but that's sort of what really inspired me. 

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Lovesick and Poison Ivy from heroine.nyc probably wouldn't be most people's first choice to pair together for nail art, but there's something about these two colours side by side that really inspired me. I also just recently picked up Essie Gel Couture polish in High Sewciety from their new Brilliant Brocades collection and I had a feeling that it would work really well as a base for the leopard print, so I applied one coat as a base to my middle two nails. 

I started with the nail art for this mani, so using one of my NailStuff.ca Dotting Tools*, I just sort of randomly applied blobs of Lovesick on my ring finger and Poison Ivy on my middle finger. One thing that I love about a leopard print design is that I don't have to be too precious or fussy about it, it's just sort of a slap it on and go type of situation. Once I had applied those, I went in with the opposite end of the same dotting tool and some black stamping polish to do the outlines of the spots as well as filling in some of those gaps with some little curvy blobs. Easy as pie. 

I decided at this point that I wanted the colours alternating, so instead of applying the solid full nail colour next to the print of the same colour, I swapped it and applied one coat of Lovesick to my first finger and one coat of Poison Ivy to my pinkie.

To finish, I first sealed in the nail art using a water based top coat and then finished with a glossy top coat to all my nails and voila!

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At this time of year, I always find that I struggle with inspiration, but I've actually sort of been bursting with it recently because I've been trying out so many polishes that are new to my collection. These definitely aren't two colours that I ever would have thought to put together (although green and purple have always been a favorite pairing for me so it kinda makes sense) but I love how it turned out.

If you want to check out the heroine.nyc Winter Wishes Collection, check out my full review here. Their polishes are available on their website and they're just amazing!

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