52-Week Challenge: 5/20 - Pastel

This week's theme from the 52-week challenge I've been (mostly) following is pastel. So I used a pale pink, a baby blue, a light green, and white to make this pretty floral panorama on my nails.

I started with a base of two coats of Nailtiques St. Croix, though these pictures make it look kind of lavendar rather than the milky pink it really is. I used Sinful Colors Snow Me White to brush a broad french tip on each nail, and then Avon Vintage Blue and a detail brush made up flowers of various sizes. I used more Snow Me White to draw in the details on the flowers (and in a few cases, blue again and white again on top of that), and then China Glaze Tree Hugger to draw in the vines and occasional leaf.

My nails are just about the only part of me that gets much of a chance to be delicate or girly, since I've been a tomboy since I was old enough to climb trees. I don't really care for lace, hardly wear the jewelry I own, and I couldn't keep a flowering plant alive to save my own life, so I have to make do with flowers on my fingers!

Simple Elegance

Sorry I've gone so long without posting, guys! I've been crazy busy at work and then when I get home, I just want to hibernate, so while I've still been doing my nails and taking pictures of them, I haven't gotten around to actually typing up blog posts. Bad Ro, no biscuit!

So  here's one I did a while back. My co-workers said this was very "restrained" for me. I think I actually managed to hit what I consider "elegant" for once. If you read my descriptions of the nail art I post to my Pinterest board for ideas/inspiration, you'll realize that I have a hard time going with simple. I feel like I overdo my nail art a lot. So I guess this is restrained for me! But I was really happy with it.

This nail art was inspired by the lovely work of MissAdelinne:

I don't really have any polishes that work as nudes for me, and I don't like doing french tips unless my nails actually are all long enough to have white tips on the ends, so instead I started with a base color of Nailtiques St. Croix, topped with Sinful Colors Purple Diamond. Then I used a dotting tool and China Glaze Liquid Leather for my pretty little details.

I always ask my husband what he thinks of "my pretties", and he laughs because he doesn't really care (it's like asking me what I think of this guitar he's looking at!) but like I try to, he gives his honest opinion. I learned with this manicure that he really doesn't "get" the whole accent nail thing. "It looks like it's unfinished," he said. "Like you painted the design on just a few nails and got bored." Well, finished or unfinished, I was really happy with the way this manicure came out. How about you? What's your opinion on the accent nail versus nail art on all ten digits?

Week 45 - Tribal

I didn't have any posts last week, and I think that's a first in months. I did do my nails a few times - I tried to push myself to keep up with the Halloween challenge, and I did my version of "witches" by drawing wiccan symbols on one hand (I had a pentacle, a moon and sun, and a three-phase moon) and the colors of the elements on the other (earth, air, fire and water). But I never got around to taking pictures of it. And then for Halloween itself I painted my nails to match my kimono costume, but the pictures I did take came out horrible. There wasn't any art to the manicure, just a gorgeous purple with blue glitter on two of the nails of each hand, so when the pictures came out overwhelmingly BLUE and I couldn't get the color even passibly accurate, I decided they weren't worth posting.

Now I hope I've kicked the depressive phase I've been in for the last few weeks, and my nails and everything else will get interesting again, but at least for last night, I managed to get going. This week's them for A Year's Challenge is "tribal". So I looked up a bunch of Cherokee patterns (since I'm part Cherokee, myself) and drew up some designs. I also added a dreamcatcher - I have no idea if Cherokee used them or not, but *I* use them as a pagan and a shaman, so I added one anyway.

I started with a base of two coats of Fingerpaints Don't Make a Scene, except for on my thumbs, which has two coats of Nailtiques Shanghai. I used a detail brush for everything except the four dots on the thumb, for which I used a dotting tool. The colors: Milani Whitest White and China Glaze Liquid Leather for the basics (I need to get another bottle of LL, as it's over half-gone!) China Glaze Solar Power, Sally Hansen Blue Me Away!, and Nailtiques Shanghai for the yellow, blue, and reds, respectively.

And the highlight of my morning today - I came into my office to find a small package in red-tissue paper, tied with a pretty purple ribbon. This is what was inside it:

 Awwwwwwwwww! I have awesome co-workers! When I went to thank her, she tried to tell me that she was sure it wasn't a higher quality polish like I normally buy...at which point I stopped her and told her that Sinful Colors is the second-biggest-brand on my polish shelf. AND I didn't have Nail Junkie yet, so I'm very happy to have it! Again, she tried to wave away the gift, but I'm just tickled pink that a co-worker actually thought of me when she was out shopping, and picked something up for me. It was so sweet!

Lastly, here's a heads-up for you: I've reached 52 followers on this little blog of mine, which is just amazing to me, really, and I want to have a giveaway for you awesome people who think my attempts at pretties are worth your time. :) I'll need to figure out what polishes to give, and get them in hand, but sometime in the next few weeks I'll put up a Thank-You for Following giveaway for Thanksgiving.

Random Plaid Mani

You know, I should know better than to join a nail art challenge that requires two manicures a week, and then ends with three days in a row. I should have known my ADHD would rear up and make me lose interest in it. I did actually manage to do last Friday's challenge, "witches", albeit on *Saturday*...but then I never got around to taking pictures of it. I'll try to convince myself to do that tonight. If I do, you'll just have to ignore the tip wear. :)

I'm clearly not going to be able to finish the last three days of the challenge, though, because I haven't finished our Halloween costumes, so I'm going to be SEWING for the next two nights! And then Tuesday night I will have to do my manicure to go with the costume, so it will not fit with the challenge. Ah, well. I need to be more honest with myself before jumping into things, I guess.

In the meantime, here's a manicure I did some time last month, because I needed something on my nails besides Halloween for a committee meeting. I rarely do a manicure to match my clothes - since I only do my nails around twice a week, I usually choose my clothes to go well with my nails rather than the other way around. :) But I had just bought this dress the week before, and I was wearing it to a committee meeting, and I thought that I could do a manicure that went well with it. I suck at plaid, but I think this one came out well enough (although admittedly it was my second try!)

First, here's the dress:

I started with a base of Nailtiques Milan, then I did stripes of China Glaze Stone Cold, and thinner striped of Liquid Leather.

I finished it off with NYC Matte Me Crazy to give it that soft fuzzy look to go with the soft knit of the dress. I'm always annoyed at the difficulty in clean-up with any red polish, but I do think the manicure as a whole came out very nicely.

Gorramit!

That's such an emotive word - gorramit! Not quite onomatopoeia, since that's words for sounds that sound like the sounds (like bam or splat), but definitely an ideophone (words that evoke a vivid impression of certain sensations or sensory perceptions, e.g. sound, movement, color, shape, or action), at least to me. It just feels like a curse, the way your mouth wraps around it. 

But you're not here for my musings on phonosemantics! What you're interested in is the fact that I won a giveaway from Sassy Lacquer, and she gave me a bottle of Nerd Lacquer!! Specifically (if you haven't already guessed!) I got a bottle of Gorramit. She also gave me a bottle of Color Club Antiquated, which looks gorgeous in the bottle, but I haven't yet swatched (since I'm out of swatching sticks, but I have more slowly heading my way from Hong Kong.)

So today's manicure is made almost entirely of polishes that were given to me. :) I started with a base of 2 coats of Nailtiques Milan (which I mentioned in the last post about having received in a giveaway), except for my ring fingers, which got two coats of China Glaze Solar Power. I put tape down the middle of all my nails except the accents, and layered on one coat of Gorramit. I decided later to add a second coat to the accent nails for just a bit more density on the glitter, but I could easily have gone with just one.

At this point, I own polishes from about a half-dozen indie polish makers, but out of the ones with a variety of glitters, (as opposed to an even layer of shimmer or microglitter, like Girly Bits Street Magic or Windestine's Rainforest), this is hands down the most smooth application, with the MOST even placement of glitters I've seen thus far, including quite a few corporately produced glitters! I hardly had to dab glitter on at all, it just went smoothly across the nail, and a couple of strokes resulted in a surprisingly consistent layer of glitter across the surface.

If you can't tell, the lines of "dots" are made from individual glitters picked off the brush with a dotting tool, and laid in as straight a line as I could manage. There are orange hexes, yellow hexes of two different sizes, and red squares - at least that I can see clearly. :) This manicure is one of those rare times that it looks on the nail exactly as I envisioned it when I designed it! I love it when a plan comes together!

I freely admit that if I could pick one Nerd Lacquer out of all of them ever produced, Gorramit wouldn't be the one I'd pick (no matter how much I love Firefly, I just don't gravitate toward yellow polish), but nonetheless, it's gorgeous, and I now understand why exactly her polishes sold so amazingly well while she was producing them. The quality is simply stunning. So many, many thanks to Emily for allowing me to own an endangered species of polish before it goes completely extinct. :)

 

 

Nailtique Nail Fail

I won a giveaway from Samariam's Swatches lately and received four packages of Nailtique polishes. Aren't these lovely?

The four colors shown, from left to right, are Shanghai, Rio, St. Croix, and Milan. So I wanted to do a manicure using all four colors! V had just purchased a package of four craft scissors in different cutting patterns because she wanted a zigzag design on her nails, so after I was done with her mani, I pulled out one of the other pretty patterns and cut some tape for me.

Despite the fact that the title of the post says "nail fail", I actually got a LOT of positive comments about these nails. My co-workers all loved them (and they're pretty reliable about telling me when they don't) but they're just not what I was hoping for. I think if I had put the Milan on the end, and used Shanghai for the dots instead, then it probably would have come out more like what I was mentally picturing. But the color difference between Rio and Shanghai just wasn't enough for the taping pattern to really show up.

I really like St. Croix, though. It's the only nude I really have, and if I used just two coats it would be great for french tipping. I used three coats to get this level of opacity.