Tokyo Nail Expo 2012 Nail Art Winners

I finally managed to get my hands on a Japanese nail art magazine (double the cover price, but that’s life) that reveals the winners of the Tokyo Nail Expo nail art contest! Sorry for the delay but the magazine comes out 2 months after the competition and then I had to locate it overseas. But good things are worth the wait, right? Click to enlarge.

Of course, it’s in Japanese but the numbers denote 1st, second and third places, etc. The grand prize was around $400USD, but it’s really all about the publicity, of course. Given the time to create the nails and the materials cost, $400 is not much.

There are a lot of nail art contests out there, but they are really expensive to enter, and the prizes are usually just tokens. I’d like to try a few contests in the upcoming year, but with an entry fee of around $100, I’ll have to pick and choose carefully.  It seems a bit of a racket. I know they want to have good art for the competitions, but should it really be $100 to enter if the prize is just $200 or $300?

All those philosophical questions aside, here’s some of what I’ve been making recently:

Alice In Wonderland silhouettes.

Vintage botanical flowers inspired by old gardening books.

Japanese woodblock prints.

And I’ve been having a lot of fun blinging other things besides nails after doing my shoes last autumn. Here’s a peacock wallet with loads of crystals on it that I made. It’s actually harder to work on a bigger surface- I can bling a tiny nail with ease, but a wallet feels really big!

I hope that everyone’s New Year is off to a stunning start. 🙂