"Inspired By" + a bonus mani

Kitties26 from More Nail Polish is having a giveaway/contest in celebration of her 2-year Blogiversary. But she didn't want to just give away stuff, she wanted us to put forth some effort to enter. So she wanted to see nail art where we were inspired by something. Not only that, but there are three prizes on offer. First prize will be awarded to the winning nail art as judged by a "panel of judges" - basically her husband, mom, and various family members. :) Winners for prizes two and three will be chosen randomly, one from Australian entries (where she lives), and one from international entries. Each winner gets THREE bottles of Lynderella nail polish! WOW! First prize is She Lived in a Swamp, Happy HoloDaze, and Gotta Love Brains. The randomly-chosen Australian winner will receive Thank Blue, All Hallow’s Eve, and Cauldron Drippings, and the international winner will find Mercury’s Rainbow, Bibbitty Bobbity Boo Blue, and One Nutty Fruitcake in their mail! Entries must be received by 11:59 pm on Sunday, March 11. (ANY 11:59 anywhere in the world. :) Click here to go to the giveaway post.

First, here's the picture I used as my inspiration:

This gorgeous photograph is copyright by Edward Thomas. If you click on the picture, it will take you to his website to see more of his amazing work. In the meantime, here's my approximation of this beautiful scene:

I have a tree on both thumbs, but the one on my right hand is necessarily not as pretty as this one, since I'm right-handed. :) I started with a base of one coat of Cinderella to give a nice sky background if any showed through the sponged "leaves", and added a sheer pearl and another sheer sparkle blue. Then I sponged on four different greens on the bottom half of my nails, and then two yellows and two oranges on the top half. Finally, I sponged just a touch of brown in the green areas, then used two different browns to draw the tree with a detail brush and a verrrry thin dotting tool. I actually used the spun sugar technique for the thinnest branches! Here are all the polishes that went into this!

Well, my subject line mentioned a bonus manicure. You may remember that I showed you a manicure I did for my friend Vicki back on February 29. Believe it or not, until today she'd only experienced minor tip wear! So she called me this morning and asked if she could come by and get her nails did. ^_^ I apologize for taking the pictures before we did the clean-up, but here's what ended up on her nails today.

All the nails have a base of one coat of Sinful Colors Exotic Green with one coat of Girly Bits Street Magic over it. The french tips are two coats of Sinful Colors All About You. The thumb has one coat of All About You topped with one coat of Essie Shine of the Times, so it has some gorgeous color changing at different angles. I was amazed at how different Street Magic looks over a light green than it does over black! It was full-out emerald over black. Here it just added a subtle green shimmer, which was gorgeous and perfect for this manicure, but verrrrrry different!

I need to get a table that's suitable for doing nail art on. Currently I do my own manicures sitting at this computer desk. ::grin:: Yes, that means I have my polish bottles cluttered up on one side, my keyboard pushed back toward my monitor, and just all around tiny space. Mind, it's my most comfortable space, but still. Not exactly designed for the purpose I'm putting it to. It's only exacerbated when trying to do Vicki's nails, because we use a corner of the dining room table, which doesn't work well. So I started looking up narrow tables that might be useful for doing a manicure on, at a not-too-expensive price! I think I'm going to ask on my Facebook group what everybody else uses. How about you?