How to: rainbow aztec nails

Okay. I should probably apologise in advance for this. It's going to be a bit of a weird how to. But I painted my nails in a sort of rainbowy tribal aztec style (with inspiration from wah nails as always) and have been getting so many "ooh, that must be hard" comments that I decided to do a tutorial. So er, here goes.

This is what you are going to end up with! Lovely colourful nails. I used models own colours (feeling blue, top turqoise, lemon meringue, fuzzy peach & red alert). For the details I used my crayola nail art pens and a gloopy black no17 polish.

This is where it gets a bit strange. Hello awesome photoshop.

Step 1. Paint a yellow strip in the middle of each nail (the white bits are supposed to be bare nail!).

Step 2. Now do the same thing with the rest of your colours. Overlap the yellow slightly on each side with orange and green, then do that with red and blue. Lightest colours first!

Step 3. Now use your black polish to paint across the bottom of the nail. I used the GLOOPIEST polish in the world, which explain why my lines are totally squint.

Step 4. Using a white nail art pen (or a thin brush, OR a kirby if you have a steady hand) paint a line about half way up the nail. Do polka dots on the lower patch of black.

Step 5. Get a black nail art pen (or again, kirby or cocktail stick or tiny brush) and outline either side of the white line. I then drew triangles on the top of each line (which was easy enough on my left hand, but SO hard on my right hand). Then on my ring finger and thumb I did tiny little diagonal lines (you can see these in the top photo!).

& that's it! SO easy. Well. That was a little lie. If you are like me (i.e. very messy) yours will look a lot more like this at the end:

Shamefully this totally looks like my actual nails.

But all you need is some cotton buds and nail polish remover to tidy it up. I really need to try and be neater though, it is quite shameful.

Any tips to not look like you've painted your entire hand?