New Year, new challenge! I’m starting three new challenges this January, and this is the first to kick off. It’s FingerFood’s Theme Weeks challenge, where there is a theme each week on a Sunday.

The first theme is animal print. I have always wanted to do a multi-coloured leopard print, but I thought I’d do it using rainbow colours and in a horizontal gradient. I’ve seen multi-coloured manicures that don’t use rainbow colours nor do they follow a rainbow order, and I’ve seen them where they do a rainbow gradient across the nails vertically. But I’ve not seen it done horizontally – from cuticle to tips. However, I quickly realised that to fit on six colours, I’d have to do my leopard spots really small. I recalled some wonderfully intricate manicures done by Louise from Tips and Top Coat, where she does tiny leopard print, and thought I’d give it a go.

It was surprisingly easy, especially with my new nail art pen.

On top of a base of OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls, I dotted some randomly-shaped blobs, starting with red and going through the rainbow colours towards the tips of my nails. I used all Barry M polishes. Then I top-coated this before adding in the black outlines with some diluted acrylic paint and my new nail art pen, which works wonderfully for precision and detailed work.

Here are the manicures from everyone else that is participating:

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