Forget Me Nots in Fall

Last week I showed you little blue flowers on a nude background. This week, another manicure done with Forget-Me-Nots, on a burgundy background. Of course, last week's was done in April, and this manicure was done in August, which may have had a bearing on the base color chosen!

The blue is definitely Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau, and the yellow looks to be Sally Girl. Banana. My first thought, looking at the base color, is that it is Rimmel Burgundy Flirt, but looking at the swatches online, Burgundy Flirt looks brighter red than this. Now I'm curious and I'm going to make a note to myself to look through my stash when I get home today and find out which polish I used here. ^_^

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!

Green and Blue Dots...or Bubbles?

I know, it's been over a month since I posted. I have almost a dozen blog posts sitting in draft format with edited pictures just waiting for me to type some words to go with them. Pitiful, ain't I? ^_^

And I apparently didn't write down which polishes I used for this one, so you'll just have to enjoy the dotticured pretties, but I can make some guesses. That background green is likely Sinful Shine Amazonian, or perhaps Zoya Logan, but I got the Amazonian more recently, so I'm more likely to have used it. I seldom have untried polishes for more than a week before they get put on my nails!! The pale blue dots are most likely Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau, but I'm having a hard time figuring out what the sheer blue glitter is. I'll take a look through my stash when I get home (I'm typing at lunch from work!) and edit this if I find it from the swatch sticks rather than my stash list. :)

Flowers on a Million Dollar Mermaid

I have a few manicures that I did back before Christmas that never got posted for some reason, so you get filler posts for now. One of my polish exchange group sent me a Deborah Lippmann polish. I can't fathom spending that kind of money for a polish unless it was on someone's really high wish list, but I'm certainly not ungrateful! The reason I joined the exchange group was to get polishes that I wouldn't buy for myself, so I had a full range of colors in my palette whenever I wanted to create something new, and Million Dollar Mermaid definitely qualifies!

If I remember correctly, this is just two coats of MDM. I remember expecting it to be sheer and being surprised at how thoroughly it covered. As should be expected from a high dollar polish, the glitter spread completely evenly and no moving it around was required for full coverage. I used Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau and Primark Beauty Neon Blue for the flowers, along with one of my several different white polishes. For some reason, I didn't note down which white I used, so I can't tell you this long after the fact. ::sheepish grin::

Spring Bluebonnets in Summer

This manicure was one of those rare, spectacular times, when I was not using anyone else's manicure as inspiration, and yet my nails managed to come out exactly as I was imagining it when I designed it!

I started out with Milani Whitest White as a base, and then used the plastic wrap method to marble on first Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau and then Avon Vintage Blue. It came out, as I said, exactly as I had mentally pictured - that beautiful bright but pale blue of the sky on a crisp spring day with a hint of white to imply wispy white clouds.

I used a detail brush to add stems of Sinful Colors Exotic Green, and then my smallest dotting tool with China Glaze Frostbite for the bluebonnet flowers. I stippled the flowers quite thoroughly rather than just putting solid dots of the lacquer, in order to let some of that white/blue from the polish underneath come through, to add texture and depth to the flowers.

I really was blown away by how these nails came out just the way I wanted them to. While I often draw out a design that I want on paper, I only paint an actual practice nail maybe a third of the time, and this wasn't one of them. I just had an idea and went to town on my fingernails, and I was so excited to watch the picture in my mind take shape on my tiny little canvases!

52-Week Challenge: 4/29 - Inspired by Food

Strawberries! Let's face it - I don't really get inspired by food. No matter how many artists have been moved to paint still life portraits of bowls of fruit, that isn't me. So I typed 'food nail art' into google, clicked 'images', and browsed. Still really not inspired, but I think the strawberries are cute, so strawberries it is! :)

I started with a base of my brand new white, Sinful Shine Wisp. I used Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau and sponged some on the top half of the nail, because I didn't want that stark white as contrast. The base color for the strawberries is Sinful Shine Devious, and then I used China Glaze Adventure Red-Y and Solar Power for the seeds; OPI Jade is the New Black and China Glaze Tree Hugger made the stems.

I was told this morning that they're "cute" and one person said they looked tasty! To which I replied, "No nibblin' on the nails!"

 

April Tri-Polish Challenge: Day 3

Here is my third entry for April's Tri-Polish Challenge, brought to us by Crumpet's Nail Tarts. We're given three colors at the start of the month, and we have to choose one polish for each color, and then create four manicures that each use at least two of those three, and at least one of the four has to use all three. We're also allowed to use white, black, gold, silver, and clear-based glitter in our creations.

April's colors are pink, turquoise, and orange, for which I chose Sinful Colors Orange Cream, China Glaze For Audrey, and Wet n Wild Sunny Side Up. For today's mani I also used Milani Whitest White and Color Club Antiquated. I'm not sure if Antiquated counts as silver or gold, as in some lights it looks one, and sometimes it looks the other. But I figure that it's close enough that I won't get a slap on the wrist for it, right? ;)

My inspiration for today's nail art came from this amazing manicure by the delightful Kathleen:

Isn't is GORGEOUS? I can't do it justice, but it certainly inspired me. I hope you enjoy my rendition of it as much as I enjoyed having it on my nails!

Now let's see all the other pretties my fellow Nail Tarts have created!

52-Week Challenge: 4/15 - Flowers

I've never been any good at french tips. I love the way they look on other people - very classy and sophisticated. But even if I use a tip guide to get a good line, I'll get one finger too far down or up compared to the other fingers, or something else will go wrong. It's never quite the way I want it to come out. But with this manicure, I was able to cover the worst of the issues!

The two base colors for this manicure are both brand new untried polishes for me. I've been picking up nudes here and there for the last couple of times I was polish shopping, and I've finally found one that actually looks nude on me! NYC Carrie'd Away is the underlying color of these nails, and then I used China Glaze Midtown Magic for the french tips.

After that, I drew the flowers with a detail brush and Milani Whitest White. Then I painted over the white with Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau on some flowers and China Glaze Sugar High on the others. I used more Whitest White to draw little lines for detail on the flowers, then added some Primark Beauty neon yellow for the centers.

MSMD - "Brushstroke" Technique

It's my very first Monkey See, Monkey Do Monday! I copy other people's ideas often enough anyway; I might as well make it official. ;)

I was so inspired by The Swatchaholic's entry to March Polish Days - Vintage that I did my own version of it that very evening! And then it took me a few weeks to find where I'd downloaded the pictures. Admittedly, sometimes I do the editing at work during lunch hours and sometimes I do it at home over the weekend, but I still don't know how these pictures got to the folder they ended up in, which was not the right place on either computer...

This was the Swatchaholic's absoloutely beautiful brushstroke technique manicure:

She was using a "vintage" polish to go with the March theme, but what really struck me was how much like gemstones her nails looked. So I went through my swatchsticks picking out polishes that shone and glowed and glittered like hers! My nails came out completely different, but I loved them. They were beautiful, and even my co-workers really oooh'ed and ahh'ed over these pretties.

I used a base of Sinful Colors Winterberry, though like TS's comment, I could really have gone without a base color at all, by the time I was done. I lined up the following bottles on my desk: Sinful Colors Daddy's Girl and Purple Diamond, China Glaze Ruby Pumps and Riveting, Avon Lucky Penny, Color Club Antiquated, and a little mini Lisa Frank Nail Magic with no name but is a sheer pink shimmer. I loosened them all up, and one at a time, scraped most of the polish off the brush and put just a swoosh on each nail in random places. I went across all ten nails with the first color, then followed immediately with the second color, etc. I went through the entire row of polishes twice, then hit it with a top coat of Seche Vite and this was the lovely result!

Given how little polish was going on in each brush, I didn't even have to wait for any layers to dry. By the time I finished my tenth nail with one color, the first one was mostly dry, and my next color tended not to go in the same place, anyway, so most of each stroke got to dry for two passes before it got touched by another color, really. It looks in these pictures like it's textured, but the top coat really was nicely smooth across it. This was one of those manicures where I kept stopping and just looking at the pretty sparkly nails from time to time!