Showing posts with label Barielle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barielle. Show all posts

Friday, October 31, 2014

Candy Corn at Sunset

And now for something completely different! Oops, wait, that will have to be another day, because this is the obligatory Halloween manicure. ^_^ Actually, I did this mani last week. As I write this post, I have no idea what I will have on my nails for my anniversary. Probably just plain black, as the kids have me dressing up as Death this year. My kids will be Ren & Lin dressed as Black Cats of Halloween. I am apparently officially *old* now, because I thought that this would be an extremely obscure costume...but apparently anyone into anime would know what this is. I was chatting with the clerk at the fabric store when I bought the material to make their shorts and cloaks, and she knew exactly what I meant when I told her. But then, she and her friends are going as the Teen Titans this Halloween. :)

Anyway, the manicure!


Obviously the index and middle fingers are meant to portray candy corn. The remaining three are not strictly Halloween scenes. They're just sunset with tree and bird/bat silhouettes. I didn't even paint any gravestones! And yet, because of the time of year, one immediately interprets the flying beasties as bats rather than birds.


I was really happy with the trees on my thumb. Not so much the one on my pinkie - I was trying for a spreading tree, like an oak, rather than the tall skinny ones like on the thumb - but it just came out blobby, I think. I started with a base coat of Pure Ice Superstar! which is my current white polish. The candy corn was done with Primary Beauty Neon Yellow and Wet N Wild The Clock Strikes Orange, though I touched up the yellow ends with Sally Girl Banana later, as my index fingernail broke and the polish chipped on the middle nail before I could get pictures (it was raining a lot when I had these nails.)


The sunset was done with a gradient of Barielle Jordana's Skinny Jeans, Broadway O! Jessica, and The Clock Strikes Orange, with the ground and silhouettes painted in Sinful Shine Dark Room, which is my current black polish. I didn't take any pictures of my right hand because it was just plain bad. The thumb smudged at some point and while sometimes I can draw decently left-handed, this manicure was not one of those times. :P




Monday, October 6, 2014

Green Sparks or Peacock Feathers

Green sparks is my name for this mani, and peacock feathers is L's name. Either way, I really really liked this one! It was even prettier on my fingers than it looks in the pictures. I liked just wiggling them around and watching the light play on the green glitter.


The base color is Barielle Aura Angora, and the black I used is Sinful Shine Dark Room, but I'm not sure what I used for the green glitter. I have several of those I might have chosen from. It could have been Zoya Ivanka or Nubar Greener, just off the top of my head. Give me a holler if you want to know the whole list (somewhere between 3-5, I'm thinking) of polishes I have that it might have been.


Now, I am the first to admit that while I'm a fairly good technician when it comes to creative/artistic things, I am not actually creative. Most of my best manicures are copied from someone else - I can't come up with a pretty and aesthetically balanced design if my life depended on it. And this mani is no exception. The amazing Liloo did these two manicures that I shamelessly copied from:

 

Aren't they amazing?! They both link to her blog, since I can't find the individual posts they came from, but I really enjoy her manicure designs. She does tiny fine lines MUCH better than I can, but I was still happy with my results.






Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Water Marbling in Color Combo 54

If anybody besides my co-workers notices such things, I apologize for the lack of posting for the last few months. I've still been doing my nails once or twice a week, and taking pictures, but the social spoons required to add words to these posts have been extremely absent. My then-17-year-old son moved in with us in January, and he graduated high school in early June. Since then, the stress level in my home went up by quite a bit, as he never managed to get a summer job, and so was in the house, with the husband and the littler kids, nearly 24/7. Not that he's a bad kid, but adding an adult male who is an essential stranger into an existing household is stressful, no matter how well you get along with the guy and how much you love him!

Well, he started college and moved into the dorm about three weeks ago, and I'm finally getting my typing fingers into gear and starting to post again. The oldest mani I have in my drafts is a watermarble. I had no particular color in mind, so I browsed colorcombos.com and found a batch I liked.


So, I found the four polishes in my stash that came the closest to those four colors: Sinful Shine Break Away, Sinful Shine Alfresco, Barielle Aura Angora, and Wet N Wild Sunny Side Up. I really don't have a color that actually matches that pale peach in the middle, but I did my best. And now for the resulting watermarble!


Except for the accidental double-dipping of the ring finger, which actually looks pretty artistic, this ended up being the best watercolor I've done to date, I believe.


I did accidentally double-dip a finger on my right hand as well, though this time it was the middle finger.


And after that, it's just the pretty pictures...





Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Spring Curtains through a Window Frame

My co-worker, L, has decided that she is going to name all of my manicures. I was really just going for plaid with this nail art, but she decided that the blue and light brown looked like curtain fabric behind the dark brown window frame, so the blog title was born.


The base color for the designed nails is Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau, and the plain nails are Barielle Aura Angora. Also used on the designs are Cherimoya Vernis Classique Cappucino and Primark Beuaty Neon Blue.



My left thumbnail decided to smudge the next morning even though it had been dry before I went to bed the night before. It was fine when I woke up, but after getting ready for work, the polish had smooshed itself back. I smoothed it out as best I could, but the closeup pics are tattletales!


Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Bayberry in November

The last of my back-dated manicures, I finally went back to fall colors for one last hurrah. Having found a variety of gorgeous plants and fallen leaves along with some holly springs, I made this pretty little thing for my desk at work:



This picture was taken with my phone, so the colors weren't captured nearly as vibrant as they were in real life. The reds and purples came out nicely, but the yellow and orange were much more vivid and striking than this picture shows. The next day I created this on my nails to go with it!


I used quite a few different polishes for this one! On a base of NYC Fashion Safari, I used Vernis Milk Chocolate and Cappucino to draw some branches, and I added random swipes of Barielle Myrza's Meadow for some green-tinted sparkly goodness. I then used a dotting tool to create leaves with alllll of the following polishes...

(listed in primarily color-spectrum order)
Sinful Colors Beau Brique
Sinful Colors Timbleberry
Wet N Wild The Clock Strikes Orange
Wet N Wild Sunny Side Up
Sally Girl Banana
Sinful Colors Let's Meet
Sinful Colors Innocent
Sinful Colors Happy Ending

That's a lot of polishes, but I always have fun with a dotting tool and I really think the end result was gorgeous.




Monday, October 28, 2013

Fall Marbling

It's the week of Samhain, so I bring to you my week of Halloween-themed nail art! For the first two days, I have two watermarbles that I tried. Please pardon the tip wear on these pictures - I took the pictures the second day, and for some reason they had already started wearing on the tips, which is not usual for me.


I started with a base of Sinful Shine Wisp on the nails to be marbled, and I used Barielle Aura Angora, China Glaze Coral Star, and China Glaze Midtown Magic for the marbling. My pinkies were done with straight Midtown Magic, and my thumbs (which I didn't bother to show) in just Coral Star.

I was going for a sort of candy corn type of pattern, and while it didn't come out as I envisioned (does watermarbling ever come out as expected?) it still came out pretty darned pretty. :)






Monday, September 16, 2013

MSMD Chocolate & Caramel

I don't always have a Monkey See, Monkey Do, though most of my manicures can tip their hat to someone for giving me the idea, but this post was completely based on Spektor's Nails manicure which looked to me like someone drizzled chocolate and caramel on top of a piece of candy. I just had to have it on my own nails for a few days!


Mine came out more blobby than hers did, mostly due to my lack of patience, but I loved it all the same, and all my co-workers thought they were amazing. I started with a base of Finger Paints Don't Make a Scene (it's my only basic tan color - I really need to get a few more in that shade range) and used Barielle Aura Angora and Sinful Colors Coffee for the spun sugar lines.






And now for something completely different...or, you know, other people's Monkey See, Monkey Do's!

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Autumn Swirled French Tips

My friend V's hands are gracing my blog again today. I did these nails for her last week when she was over watching So You Think You Can Dance with me. It's our summer ritual - she's here every week and we watch "the dance show" together. It is THE dance show for us. :) But you're here to see pretty pictures of manicures...


She started with a base of NYC Carrie'd Away. It's the perfect nude color for my nails, however, it's clearly not the right shade of pink to be completely nude on hers, but it did the job for this manicure. I used the needle marbling technique for these, which means I put down little blobs of each color and then used a pointed tool (in this case, my smallest dotting tool which comes to a point without an actual "dot" at the end) to swirl the colors together before they dry. Mixed in here are China Glaze Cranberry Splash, Harvest Moon, Riveting, and Barielle's Aura Angora, the last which was also used to make the line between the french tips and the base color.