BUCS Championships

A great deal of my time is spent on fencing related activities: trainings, competitions, fencing friends, running the fencing club etc. This weekend it was time for the BUCS Individual Championships, which is the only individual event that BUCS hosts over the year (otherwise it's all teams), and I decided to match my nails to the event.

As inspiration for the digits, I used Sport Imperial's logo (the body which the fencing club is a member of), and wrote "BUCS" on one hand and "ICFC" (Imperial College Fencing Club) on the other one. It was a bit messy, especially any letter that is round(-ish) was hard to write nicely. It didn't help that my white polish was running out. 

For the thumbs, I painted the outline of a small fencer. For someone who doesn't do the sport, it turned out to be a bit unclear what it was, but fencers really appreciated it. At the hotel the night before the competition, I attempted to do the same design on one of the other girls, but we could only find a plastic spoon to use as a tool, so it got a little messy. One of hers definitely has fencing thighs though!

Hyde Park Relays & Daleks

What to do if you have designs that you feel you haven't got time for, but simply can't wait to experiment with? There's a great solution to this: painting other people's nails! Gema's sister has been her 'model' several times by now, and over the past week I've introduced nail art to two friends. The first time it was a spontaneous idea; we were having brunch and I suddenly remembered that my friend was a big Dr Who fan, and rarely got around to doing things such as painting her nails. I had previously been looking at a Dalek design and being to impatient to wait until the new series started, I took the chance. 

To make the dots we took a pin and put it on a rubber. If you look closely you can also see the eye in the middle of each top dot - these were made with toothpicks which was also the case for the lines at the top. Colours are red/gold, black/gold, silver lake/black, marine blue/silver

Daleks, from the TV series Dr Who.

Second nail model was a planned thing. A running race, The Hyde Park Relays, was being organised by Imperial's Cross Country Club and I had played with the idea of making a design but couldn't fit a time for it to between other plans. The club's president volunteered to model for it, and result can be seen below.

The idea was to use Sport Imperial's colours, which also arethe club's colours, and then simply letters to name the club and the race. The extra detail was to the index fingers on which I tried to paint running legs (using a Sharpie) with a nice blue sky and just a single cloud on each. Funnily enough, one of the clouds ended up a bit close to the ground, so it looks more like a sheep, but overall I think it turned out rather well!

As mentioned, the details on the index fingers were done with Sharpies. The white letters were written using a striper from Primark, which was a bit tricky for the rounder shapes but worked fine, and the rest is normal brushes.

Photo by Ed Hallett

IC XC - Imperial College Cross Country

Hyde Park Relays design

Photo by Ed Hallett