Week 49 - Glitter Sandwich

The theme for week 49 in The Year's Challenge was Glitter Sandwich Mani! I actually did do this manicure on time last week, but I was in San Diego and didn't have my photo editing program with me, so I had to wait to post it until after I got back. Which is why you all got to see my old mint stripes manicure (by "old" I mean I painted it maybe a week before I posted it?) last Friday instead of my pretty sparkles!

For my jelly to sandwich the glitter between, I chose Sinful Colors Daddy's Girl. I don't have a whole lot of jellies, honestly. When I started gathering nail polish, I bought a lot of shimmery polishes, because they were what caught my eye. After a few months, I realized that my nail art paint palette was missing a lot of colors, which I really needed cremes for, so I started buying creme colors. I actually avoided transparent polishes because it would annoy me that that beautiful color would take three or four coats to produce, which meant I couldn't use it on top of any other color. However, I've since learned the wonders you can produce with layering jellies, and now I WANT! Regrettably, no one has a nice listing of "which colors from which brand are translucent and which are opaque". I pretty much have to look up swatches of individual polishes and read the blogger reviews on them. One. At. A. Time. Not a fun research topic. :P

So, for the glitters! For index, middle, and pinky fingers, I used Essie Set in Stones, and for my thumbs and ring fingers, I used Essie A Cut Above. The pink versus silver glitters came out with a subtle but beautiful difference, I think! And I included an out-of-focus picture to show you how sparkly this mani was! Woooot!

December Polish Days - Get Your Bling On!

It's December's Polish Days, and this month's theme is BLING! I'm also using this as my verrrrry belated entry for the Year's Challenge, week one, numero uno, the very beginning that I started late on. ;) That week was "Make it Sparkle".

I did my best, but you can let me know what you think - did I really get my bling on or not?

!blingbling!

I started with two coats of China Glaze Ruby Slippers for the best winter-festival-style sparkle I've got. I used Essie Set in Stones at a diagonal, and that is a really dense glitter - this is one coat! Granted, a little spreading is needed to arrange the glitters fairly evenly, but that density is from a single dip of the brush. I added rhinestones in winter festival colors across the line between the silver glitter and the red shimmer, and voila! I've got my bling on! There's also a very subtle accent nail going on, though it's easier to see in the first picture below - I changed the order of the rhinestones on my middle finger and my thumbnail. They have a red stone in the center with white stones on the outside, while the rest of my fingers have white in the middle and red on the outside (except for my pinky nails which don't have enough surface area for the outer-edge rhinestones. :)

And of course, since it's Polish Days, there are a lot of other awesome nail artists out there getting their bling on right along with me! Check them out:

Oooh Shiny!

First, you can blame the post title on the fact that my hubby and I had a Firefly marathon on Sunday, and then watched the 10th anniversary special for the short-lived and MUCH loved show. You can tell how much it was loved by everyone except the network honchos, because as they mentioned during the special - what other concept ever went from a *failed* TV show to a major motion picture? Fourteen episodes of Firefly, and a very successful movie, Serenity. I highly recommend them to anyone who has even a slight enjoyment of sci-fi, action, or westerns. Trust me. Of course, now that he's gone on to direct what they referred to as "the third biggest movie of all time", Avengers, maybe they'll trust Joss Whedon the next time he floats a story concept they don't think can work, like Buffy (seven awesome seasons and a few awards!) or Firefly.

Now, on to the actual shinies! As you can see, my friend V's hands are gracing our pages again this week. I started with two coats of Orly Buried Alive, topped it with one coat of Essie Shine of the Times, and then used China Glaze Kalahari Kiss and a detail brush to draw the design.

This beauty was inspired by Olmi, from Pieni Kynsiblogi, or A Tiny Nail Blog. Obviously I modified it to go on much shorter nails. :) We are all very sad to hear Olmi has developed an allergy to formaldehyde resin, and if she wants to continue doing her nails, will have to replace most of her stash, as they are not 5-free (or 3-free-plus, because the main three include formaldehyde, but not formaldehyde resin, so she'll need 5-free or 3-free-plus-FR, which some brands do.)

Click on the picture to go to her blog post on this mani:

Brown and Beige Tones

Hello fellow nail art admirers, and welcome to my little corner of the nail art world. Okay, it's more like a cubby, or even a niche, not big enough to be a whole corner. In fact, I think I'm that little weird-shaped splotch on the wall over there...

Ahem. Since I only paint my nails twice a week usually, occasionally three times, I tend to choose my work clothes to match my nails most of the time rather than painting my nails to match an outfit. Sometimes I'll plan a manicure to match what I'm planning to wear to a board meeting, but even for that, more often than not I've done my nails a few days before and didn't think of it.

Such is not the case with the manicure I have for you today! While I was considering what I wanted to paint on my nails, the thought of a cute little summer blouse I own popped into my head, and I thought of a design to go with it!

I started with a base color of China Glaze Call of the Wild, and added one coat of Essie Luxeffects As Gold As It Gets. I added two lines of striping tape, and then painted the nail with China Glaze Kalahari Kiss. I really need to find a nice pale cream for my polish palette. I then finished up with a dotting tool using Call of the Wild and another China Glaze, Desert Sun.

 

Week 31: Crackle

Good morning fellow hobbyists! This week's theme on the Year's Challenge is crackle. I tried a bunch of designs out on my nail wheels before deciding on this one. I also realized that while I have two Wet N Wild crackles (Free, Free at Last and You're Too Good For Him), I don't actually like either one. They're pretty colors, but they just don't crackle wide enough to actually show the base color. Maybe I'm applying them wrong, but since I haven't had any trouble getting my new Avon Mosaics to crackle properly, and I've so far hated the application of every other Wet N Wild polish I've used, other than their glitter topcoats, I suspect it's just that I don't get along with WNW polishes in general. :P

On to today's manicure! I've decided to call this Cracked Lava, because at the right angle (which I had a hard time capturing on photo, drat it!), most of my nails really do look like lava flowing under cracked, blackened rock. I love it!

There are six layers of polish here, not counting base and top coats! I started with two coats of NYC Black Lace Creme, followed by three coats of Zoya Opal on my ring fingers, and three coats of Essie LuxEffects Shine of the Times on all the others. This was topped, of course, by a single coat of Avon Mosaic Effects in Black, applied on the diagonal. I think crackle looks best applied at an angle, because that allows it to look more random, more natural than crackle applied on a straight line, which tends to look just like cracked pavement that needs repair. :P

 I took waaay more pictures than strictly necessary of this manicure. I just love color shifting polishes, and I take pictures at every conceivable angle of light, trying to show off the variation! The pictures above were taken indoors, as it seemed to be the only lighting that wanted to show the -red- on film. The remainder of these were taken in the sunlight, which is my favorite lighting for nail pictures. I've taken to taking my camera to work the day after I do my nails, so I can take pictures outside on my lunch hour, rather than taking pictures inside the night I do them.

Candy Green

My husband likes to watch car and motorcycle shows. Building, remodeling, jazzing them up - he's very mechanically inclined and he likes learning new things. Plus it's just fun to watch other people doing things you wish you could. He even recorded a show he saw a listing for that he thought I might like to see because it was on painting. Well, painting a car and doing nail art are two very different things, but regardless, I did enjoy watching it. The topic was "candy" paint jobs, what exactly that was, and how it was done. It's more of a technique than a color, you see, and it involves putting down a layer of metallic flake paint or just a metallic color, and then layering multiple layers of a sheer color overtop of that. How many layers you put on determines how deep the color is, while still allowing the metallic shimmer to shine through. We both decided at the end of it that, while interesting, the technique really couldn't be applied to nails unless you were using an airbrush.

Until I was swatching Sinful Colors San Francisco on my swatching sticks. I showed it to him and he thought that would make a really good candy color, which got me to playing. I pulled out my practice rounds and we tried multiple different colors under it (two silvers, a gold, and several different glitters), and I decided that I'd come very close to the metal flake version by using two coats of Essie Set in Stones, which makes as near opaque of glitter as I care to go, under three coats of San Francisco. I prefer the candies with a solid metallic underneath, rather than the flake, but none of my metallic polishes did the job. I'd love to try this again with a Layla Mirror Effect polish!

I think if I ever try this one again, I'll be more careful about keeping the underlayer of glitter from going over the cuticle outline, because they're nearly impossible to get out of there when doing cleanup. But personally, I think it came out gorgeous. This was done on V's nails, and she had given me free reign that day, with no suggestions on what she wanted on her nails. She looked verrrrrry skeptical after that second layer of Set in Stones, though, because while she likes glitter, she's NOT a bling sort of woman, and that was very bling! I assured her it wouldn't be so bright when we were finished, but she didn't look like she was too sure about that. ^_^ She was pretty happy with the end result, though.

Neon Glow Beams

Different people react differently to crises. Some people panic, some people don't know what to do but will follow directions, and some people automatically react to adrenaline with a cool and clear head. I'm one of the latter. So when my husband called yesterday to tell me I needed to get home right away, he was calling 911 because he was having chest pains and felt like he was about to pass out, I went straight into action. (He turned out to be okay, thankfully, though he needs to get a primary care physician to find out what caused it, but everything was functioning fine and they did the EKG, X-ray, and blood workup to verify he was not having a cardiac event, and had not had one in the last 72 hours. A paramedic friend of mine, after discussing his full history with me, said that it's probably stable angina, which isn't life-threatening, but will need to be seen by a doctor and possibly treated.)

I shut down my computer, grabbed my coat, stopped to tell my supervisor why I was leaving, and headed straight out. Drove at the maximum safe speed I could drive in the rain, called my best friend on the way to let her know what was happening because she would need to watch the kids if I had to go to the hospital with him, and the paramedics were packing up when I got there. He wasn't in danger, but they wanted him to go to the hospital, either with them or with me, to get fully checked out. So I sent him on in the ambulance, called my friend (who said her boss had said she could leave right away) and got her on the way to my place to watch the kids, explained to the kids what was going on, posted on facebook to let my family know what was happening, grabbed some water, hit the bathroom, and I was ready to drive out to the hospital as soon as my bestest friend showed up. Sat with Chris 'til the tests were done, got home, got some dinner...and about an hour after we got home, I crashed. I panic AFTER the emergency is over.

So, needing something to make sure I didn't sit there thinking about all the things that could have happened and working up into a panic attack? I did my nails. <3