31DC-D1 - Follow a Tutorial

Happy New Year, y'all!

I hope you all had a great holiday.  I spent most of the last week binge-watching Lost with Mr. Faff, which put me into a serious time crunch for starting off my first goal for the new year - the January 2015 31-Day Challenge, as hosted by Crumpet's Nail Tarts!  This is my first ever 31DC, and I had intended to get so much work done ahead of time to make it easier on myself, but then I felt guilty for not spending any time with the hubs, so... the challenge got pushed aside.  Here's hoping I'll be able to get some serious work done this next week to get myself ahead of the game for the rest of the month!  The first prompt for this challenge is to Follow A Tutorial, so I scooted over to YouTube to find a simple but elegant tutorial for NYE.  I followed this "Elegant black & pink nails with dotting nail art" tutorial by LifeWorldWomen but changed up the colors just a smidge, because, ew, pink.

This super-easy look needs only three polishes and a dotting tool!  I decided to lean on my OPIs for the job.

L-R: OPI I'm Not Really A Waitress, Push and Shove, 4 In The Morning

Following the tutorial, I applied a base coat, and then painted half my nail with I'm Not Really A Waitress red, and the other half with gunmetal 4 In The Morning.  I then applied chrome Push and Shove down the center with a dotting tool, whilst trying my best to make the dots smaller as I went down the line.

To add a dash more interest, I substituted these pointed oval rhinestones for the dots on my ring finger, and then top coated the whole party.

Super simple, right?  I can already hear some of you screaming at me about cutting my nails down again (mostly some of you bishes in Texas!), but trust me when I say it had to be done.  I was trying my best to just grow out my nails and hope they'd be strong, but I think it's gonna take another 3-4 months to completely get rid of the damaged nail plate until my nails will be back like they were before my courses.  I decided that the gel overlay was WAY too much fuss (and since the pics get right on up to my nails, I couldn't get away with filling less than once a week) so I've now filed off the hard gel, cut them back, and I'm using a single coat of the acry-gel technique to strengthen them, because the backfills will be much easier and faster, and I can soak it off rather than filing, which risks further damaging the nail plate if I'm not paying attention.

TL;DR - New Year, New Nails, y'all!

An InLinkz Link-up

Hope all of you are fantastic and I'll see you tomorrow!