St. Patrick Day Nail Art

Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day on your fingertips by creating artistic designs on your fingernails. Whether you’re attending a special St. Patrick’s Day get together, or just want to celebrate in style, wearing St. Patrick’s Day themed nail art is a unique and fashionable way to celebrate the holiday.

Ordinary applications of green fingernail polish can be perfect for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Neon green, crème greens and darker forest greens can look really cute and give your nails an instant St. Patrick’s Day look. To add interest, a combination of green shades can be alternated on fingernails or simple nail art like polka-dots can be added to create the perfect fingernails for St. Patrick’s Day.

Green and shamrocks aboud on the nail blogs this week - St. Patrick's Day is coming! I've been planning to use Rimmel's "Camoflauge" for this - it's a 60 second drying polish, which I normally would never use due to wearability issues, but the color is just perfect for this holiday. My original thought was to freehand shamrocks in white, but I chickened out, and decided to use these little plastic hearts and gold boullion beads instead.

I started with two coats of Camoflauge - it doesn't dry in quite 60 seconds, but close enough. I'd forgotten how quick you have to move with the fast-dry polishes...a slight delay can cause definite brush marks.

Then I started with one tiny plastic metallic heart. I used a flash here so it would be clear, but the hearts don't really show red at all on my nails. They're more like the first (and last) photos.

Another heart to the side for the second leaf....

And a third heart to complete the shamrock. I did four on my index fingers for "lucky clovers".

I finished them off with four gold boullion beads for the stems, and two coats of my (bubbly) top coat.

Cleaned them up, and took a few finished photos without the flash. The first and last photos here are very true to color, at least from my perspective.

This manicure didn't take me long at all - an hour maybe, start to finish? And the metallic mirror finish on the hearts picks up on the green/gold polish, so what you see in that last photo is very true to how they look in both natural and "office" lighting. Very cool effect, I think.

		Airbrush the nail pearl white or silver.
		Lightly airbrush a corner of the nail with transparent bright green paint.
		Lay a shamrock stencil at the corner of the nail and airbrush bright green.
		Apply silver and green studs at the top of the nail.