Nail Art Course

For my Birthday in December my friend bought me a nail art course and I went down to Hertfordshire last weekend to attend.

The course is run by a Hair and Beauty Supply store in Hemel Hempstead called Bondlink. They sell Beauty supplies and also run a number of beauty courses and once completed you receive a certificate. Both myself and my friend are very much into nail art as a hobby rather than learning for a career and we were hoping to pick up some new skills, in particular water marbling.

There was only myself and my friend on then course so we didn't have to share any of the nail goodies with anyone else. We arrived at 9:45 and the course ran till 2:30.

We were given a nail wheel with most nails already painted in various colours and we went though a handout which detailed different techniques to try. 

You can see above that we covered gem placement and 3D nail art, splatter techniques using a straw and a brush, matt top coat effects, flowers, dotting, striping, alternative french and creating themed nails. 

The best tip I picked up was how to create glitter gradients. Where I've attempted this before I've used a glitter polish and the gradient hasn't really worked. On this course we used loose glitter placed on the end of a nail with top coat and blew it up or down the nail to create the effect. Worked really well!

At the end of the course we got to pick a style we liked and painted each others nails. Here's what my friend did with mine.

Overall the course was lots of fun and it gave me a lot of inspiration, it also got me to try techniques that I hadn't before. I'd have loved to have been shown water marbling and how to do that, but as the tutor said it's so difficult to get right and many people offering nail art don't tend to do this for clients.

Here's a close up of the wheel I worked on and techniques used...

I'd recommend this course as a fun day out, however you can pick up all techniques covered by watching YouTube videos and picture instructions on Pinterest. 

My friend and I spent the rest of the weekend searching HobbyCraft and various other stores to find glitter mixes and things we can stick on to our nails. I'll cover what we found in a future blog post.