Have you ever submitted to a photo competition? I recently judged a competition, in which the competitors did the nails at home, took pictures of them and e-mailed them in. It was hard for me as a judge to choose my favorite. Mostly because it was a 3-D/hand-painted nail art competition (which is not my specialty), but they were also required to use a live model. And because the camera is not nearly as acute as the eyeball, and as anyone who has tried to take pictures of nail art work on a live model can tell you, it is really hard to show all the detail.

Finger angle and picture quality can make all the difference. But that is not really what I want to talk about here. If you’d like to know more about how to take pictures of your artwork for submission, NAILS senior editor Tim Crowley wrote a great article about that and you can read it here.

What I really want to comment on is the detail. Have you ever seen that miniature art painted on grains of rice? It never ceases to amaze me at how detailed some artists can get! And nail art is no different. The theme was “A Tropical Holiday” and the competitors could use any medium they wanted, i.e. embedding, hand-painting, 3-D, etc.

After much scrutiny and deliberation, I chose this set as my favorite because the competitor used every medium that was allowed and still stayed within the structure guidelines. I like the color play that she used and the detail in the 3-D elements are crisp and defined. It was the entry that most closely resembled “A Tropical Holiday” to me.

So big congratulations to Paulina Pastuszak of Poland for placing first in Nail Expert Magazine’s Photographic Nail Art Competition.

Nice job!

Cheers.

— Lynn