Football Nails

For most people this is football season until February.  For me, football season lasts until October and then Hockey starts.  So expect a lot of hockey nails, especially for the Devils.  But I do love football and the Minnesota Vikings are my team, so I think a purple and gold mani will be next!!!

These are cute, generic football nails that can be used for any team or game and people will love them.  I am also toying with the idea of doing designs for most of the teams, although I do not know if I can feel good about myself wearing Giants or Eagles colors ;P

I'll go through each design separately to make it easy.  All of the designs have Nail Tek Intensive Therapy II for the basecoat and Essie Good to Go for the top coat as always.  Any of the designs would be good accent nails for team specific manicures.  The football first...

I used China Glaze White on White and Ulta SoHo Pretty.

Start out with a white base.  Then take skinny nail tape or nail vinyls to make two stripes; one at the top and one at the bottom.  I used nail vinyls from http://nailvinyls.com/ I've been pretty obsessed with them lately.  

Paint the whole nail brown.  This brown needs multiple coats, but the finish color is great.  When the polish is still wet, peel off the nail vinyls.  This prevents any pulling of the polish.

Lastly, add the laces.  Take a skinny striping brush and paint a white vertical line with horizontal 

laces.  I could only fit three, but 

if your nails are longer do more.

Next the goalpost...

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For this I used China Glaze White on White, Essie Borrowed and Blue, Black Poppy Jade, OPI You're so Vain-illa, and China Glaze Stoaked to be Soaked.

First, sorry the pictures for these will be upside-down at first, but you'll get it.  I did a basecoat of white to make the blue a little brighter.  Then made the tip green for the football field.

Then what's behind the end zone, but the stands full of crazy fans.  For this I took multiple colors (brighter/darker work best for this technique).  Make a few random dots with each color then dab it with a sponge, I use a make-up sponge. This gives off a faded look of each color.

Continue to repeat with multiple colors, dabbing after each color is applied.  The sponge will look like this towards the end.  

To get an idea, I used all of these colors.  Like I said brighter and darker work best, so the white and tans did not show up too well. 

Lastly paint on a goalpost.  I mixed together the tan and orange to tone down the brightness of it, but use whatever color you want for this part; maybe the color of your team can go here.

Lastly, the field...

I used Revlon Posh, Black Poppy Jade, Sally Hansen Fuzzy Fantasy (from the Fuzzy Coat Collection), and China Glaze White on White.

Start off with a dark green basecoat.  Cover it lightly with the Jade, but you want the dark green to show.

Apply at least two coats of the Fuzzy Fantasy.  This is the best grass ever for nails.  The last step, but certainly not least is to take a skinny striping brush and add little lines down the sides of the nails.  I hope you enjoy and Goooo Vikings!!!!!!!