Spring Bling

I'm having a love affair with Tip Top Nails South Africa's polishes. I don't have an acurate number, but I have over 50 bottles of polishes, a couple of cuticle oils and their amazing Miraculous Results. Thanks to the combination of MR and cuticle oil and wearing gloves when I do housework and being super careful at work with the crazy amount of filing, I have managed to grow and keep my nails at a lenght I love! My nails have never been the lenght it is now and I really love it. Whenever I talk about my nails I start grinning like an idiot, which I'm doing right now at my screen :D In actual fact my middle finger nail broke just before I did this mani, I knocked it a couple of times and eventually I think it had enough. I don't think the lenght lost is that noticable

Anyway they are again having a competition on their page. This one is a Spring Bling competition. So they looking for pastel colours, no art and lots of bling. Again I wasn't sure what I wanted to do,  I wanted to do another waterfall mani, but I didn't want to be predictable. I remembered seeing a mani, where there was a silver nail, with lots of glitter. And I wanted to try that, but what would the rest of my mani look like?

So I settled for this...

Here I used Tip Top Fairydust on all my fingers except my ring finger. There I did 2 coats of Armourplate with 2 coats of Snowcapped glitter over that. I then did 2 coats of Snowcapped glitter on my pinky, thumb and middle finger. I started more than halfway up my nail with the first coat and halfway into the first coat, I started the second. Hoping it would appear as a glitter gradient. On my index finger I placed a tear drop shaped gem. I looooove how this turned out. Its so sparkly and I keep catching glimpses of the glitter and then I have to admire my handiwork. In retrospect I should have maybe used Galaxy glitter, it has more of a holographic colour and would probably have shown better on the Armourplate, but again I really loved the way this turned out.

For some reason though I struggled my ass off to take a decent picture. In the previous pic I don't like the shadow behind my hand and you can see the wonky shape of my index finger very clearly. It actually seems that I ended up with polish on my cuticle, but that is not the case.

With this picture, its really not very clear. I'm actually very dissappointed with these pics. I've taken them over multiple times, but I'm just not happy with the outcome.

What do you think? What picture is your favourite? I submitted the last one.

P.S. I tied third place :) So yayness. Joan, the CEO of Tip Top, has given all of the entrants the option to email her and get the opinion of the judges. So naturally, I did just that. I wanted to know what they thought, regardless of the fact that I was a winner. So the response was:
"An excellent improvement. Lovely, pretty entry fitting the colours, spring and bling in. The towel in the picture does kind of ruin it but we thinks she did really well and listened to the advice she was given last time."
So I was like eeeeek, its not a towel, but a blanket and I use it or a red one to take my pictures on. The reason for this being that I had read somewhere that a cluttered background distracts from the actual art itself. Guess I won't be using those blankets again... But now to find a neutral background... Any suggestions?