Hello and welcome!  Going on vacation again, and can you take a guess where?  I absolutely love Disney, so I’ll use any excuse to do some Disney themed nails.

There are a ton of wonderful Disney themed nails all over the internet.  But the ones I’ve always wanted to try for myself are the castle outlines like what @cutepolish did a few years ago.  I have been eyeing this for a while now, but I haven’t been confident enough in my free hand skills to try it.  But you have to start somewhere, right?  And since I also wanted a little bit of variety in mani the design, I added some more classic Disney nail looks.  Plus, I changed the colors to pink for Valentine’s Day.

What I Used:

• Base Coat:  Glisten & Glow – Base Coat
• 1st Color:  Ever After – Race You to the Castle
• 2nd Color:  Sinful Colors – Ruby Ruby
• 3rd Color:  Twinkled T – Vibin’
• 4th Color:  Maniology – bam! white
• Top Coat:  Essie – Speed Setter
• Maniology Mini Lotus mat
• Maniology dual sided nail art brush & dotting tool set
• Ribbitsstickits Mickey Flakes water slide decals
• small cup of water
• Maniology dual ended clean up brush & pencil stamper
• nail polish remover

I started with base coat, and then two coats of Ever After – Race You to the Castle.  I’m not the biggest fan of a bright pink like this, so I typically save it for Valentine’s Day.  But, the speckles of blue helped me like it more.  And while my nails were drying, I started making decals on my silicone mat using a small dotting tool.  The nail outlines on the mat are a lot bigger than my own, but it’s a great way to guess-timate a good size for the decals.  I know if it’s larger than the outlines, it’s too big for my nails.  Anyways, I figured that Mickey/Minnie, and red hearts, would be the perfect addition to the castle.

Two coats of Ever After Polish – Race you to the Castle

Mickey/Minnie, and red heart decals

And as you can see, I came up with a sneaky idea for the castle outline decal.  I drew it all out in pencil on a small sticky note, and then placed the note behind the clear mat.  I simply had to follow along with what I drew.  But, it wasn’t a perfect plan because my pencil drawing had much thinner lines than I could do with the dotting tool & nail polish.  So it was a great idea, but needs some work.

I filled in the other decals with some more hearts and some polka dots.  But, when I pulled up the Minnie head decal I noticed that you couldn’t see her red bow at all.  Luckily, that was the first one I did.  So I was able to add white behind anything red (so that it would actually show up better), and then I redid the Minnie head with white behind her bow.   

The drawn out castle on my sticky note

The original Minnie head bow can’t be seen

Placing all the decals on my nails

After sticking all of the decals to my nails, and cleaning them up, I decided to add a water slide decal that said “love” to my pinkies.  Then I added two coats of top coat, and was finally done.  Even though most of the work for this mani was done on the silicone mat, it took quite a bit of time.  But they came out cute enough, and I had the luxury of using my hands while working on the design without worrying about smudging them.  (Side note:  I forgot to take final pictures, so they’re a little photoshopped together based on what photos I had)

Final look – left hand

Final look – right hand

Hope everyone enjoyed their day!

Update:

Oh these poor nails!  Since we were in Florida for a week, I didn’t have time to do a new design.  So these had to stay on for two weeks instead of the usual one.  And as you can see, they did not survive at all.  And neither did my nails underneath the polish.  I picked so much at my right hand that I’m surprised I didn’t just try and remove the polish all together.  Lesson learned though:  stick to the weekly schedule.

Left hand had chipping on my thumb

My right hand had chips everywhere