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

Polka Bows

Man, it's been a whole month since I posted...again! As usual, I've still been doing my nails and taking pictures, but I just haven't seemed to have the time or words to write these blog posts.

This mani is a Monkey-See, Monkey-Do based on Radi D.'s gorgeous manicure which you can find here. Even after more than two years, I still cannot copy the tiny, crisp lines that my favorite nail artists manage. I am so in awe of their abilities!! But I was still pretty darned happy about my results, even on my winter-short nails.

I started with a base of Pure Ice Home Run, followed by a angled tip with OPI Jade is the New Black. The dark lines are done in Orly Buried Alive, and Sinful Shine Wisp was used for the white detail work. I think Sinful Shine is too thick of a polish to work for detailed lines, though, but I'm running out of my standard Milani Whitest White. I need to pick up some more plain white and black polish next time I'm at Walgreens.

Pretty Pretty Pastels

This manicure came out a lot more pretty pretty princess than I would ever intend. I just wanted something light colored and frosty. Well, I got that. But seriously, this was way too femme for me. ^_^

And on top of that, while I have a list of polishes that I used in this manicure, I really don't remember what exactly I did on this silly thing. I think there's a gradient of Sinful Colors Silver Belle and Pinky Glitter, and I used Broadway O! Jessica, Pure Ice Splash, and Sinful Colors Tokyo Pearl to make the flowers, adding tiny beads in clusters for the centers of the flowers. But I couldn't swear to that. Tokyo Pearl might be the one in the background. I seriously don't remember. Sowwy!

Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow!

We had a pretty good winter storm a few weeks ago, and I sat down the first evening, watching the snow fall, and did this manicure on my nails. I kept in on for the entire four days I was iced in and a day after so my co-workers could see the pretties once the University opened back up again.

I started with a base of Sinful Colors Silver Belle, then a gradient of Pure Ice Splash across the middle third of the nail, and across the bottom is Pure Ice Strapless. I then used Milani Whitest White and a tiny nail art brush to draw the snowflakes. I'm really the most proud of the one on my index finger, because I managed to make the lines the tiniest I'm capable of, and it looks so delicate and fragile, just like a real snowflake!

I'll even let you see the nails on my dominant hand to show the difference in quality. Blobby snowflakes! As you can see, I didn't bother trying to do them on every nail on this hand, since they were coming out so terrible.

And now for the picture spam of the pretty hand again!

Tired of Fall Colors!

Long time, no post. I haven't posted for nearly a month, but rest assured, I have been doing my nails and taking pictures. And now I'm getting around to posting them. :) First, a sad, sad thing happened. The last manicure I posted was this one:

And about four days after I painted that manicure, FOUR of my nails broke off at the quick. The next day, another two joined them. I of course filed down the remaining four to very short, but at some point over the next week, they also broke off as short as they would go.

The reason? I at first thought it was because I had tried a completely different nail shape. I've always filed my nails squoval - square, with rounded corners - but since it was always the corner edges that broke off that necessitated filing down length to make the nails square again, I decided to see what actual oval looked like on my hands. It's pretty, I think, but it did lose a lot of structural strength. My nails are very, very bendy, and making them oval seemed to make them more likely to bend farther down.

The ladies at PolishAholics Anonymous, though, suspected that the cause was most likely the fact that I haven't run out of my strengthening base coat in too long. As I said, I have very, very flexible bendy nails that also peel. I tried several different treatments when I started doing nail art to try and get them to go past the end of my fingers, but until I discovered Haken Nail Magic, nothing worked. After that, they got niiiice and long. (The above picture is a little short of their longest length, actually.) But the store I bought it from frequently ran out, so I never went more then 3 months or so using it and then I'd have to use something else for a while until I got another bottle. Welllllll the last time I bought four bottles at once via mail order. I've gone through nearly two bottles and BOOM, broken nails. I went and bought a simple quick-dry base coat, and from now on I'll be one month on, one month off with my Nail Magic, and when they're long again, I'll try the oval again, and see if they survive next time!

On to the rest of the manicure post...As the subject says, I was sick and tired of fall color manicures when I did this one, and more than a little grumpy at my stubbins. I used a base of Sinful Colors Tokyo Pearl, with Sinful Colors Super Star in random swirly designs, with a few lines of Pure Ice Splash for highlights.

Cupcake Mania!

My 9-year-old wanted her nails done the other night, so knowing some of her favorite things, I showed her a nail art I'd pinned recently that was just up her alley - cupcakes! Bedizzle was swatching some glitter indie polishes and had a pink one that made her think of sweet things, so she drew cupcakes on top of it so that the glitter looked like the frosting on the cupcakes. B loved it, so we did our best to do the same. Admittedly, I had much smaller canvases to work with!

I apologize for the quality of the pictures - it was excessively humid and I had to wipe off the camera lens after every shot, but as it was fogging up in a matter of seconds, very few of the pictures came out without some level of fog to them.

We started with a base of Pure Ice Home Run, and added a nice layer of Girly Bits Hippity Hop to the top of it. I have no idea which polishes were used in the creation of the cupcakes (other than the black was China Glaze Liquid Leather) as B just gathered a handful of polishes and said, "Use these!" On a whim, I put ice cream cones on the pinkies rather than cupcakes, but B liked them.

And here's our inspiration!

Belated July Tri-Polish #3

I actually did do three out of the four Tri-Polish Challenge manicures last month, but I didn't get the third one published on time, and then it just sat around on my hard drive. But it was a really fun mani and even late, here it is!

The colors last month were blue, blue, and green, for which I used Pure Ice Home Run, China Glaze Man Hunt, and A-England Dragon. This one was on a base of Milani Whitest White, I think. I just used a striping brush to make a few randomly-colored vertical stripes on each nail, then added large dots with smaller dots on top of them. I didn't have much rhyme or reason for which color, other than using a base of A-England Dragon instead of white for the accent nail...but it came out pretty awesome, IMHO!

July Tri-Polish #2 - taped mani

It's day two of July's episode of the Tri-Polish Challenge, brought to us by the wondermous Crumpet's Nail Tarts! This month's colors are blue, blue, and green, and my polishes are Pure Ice Home Run, China Glaze Man Hunt, and A-England Dragon.

I have long admired the crisp lines of a tape manicure, but I find the tape itself to be so fiddly that I seldom have the patience for it. But it pops up in my head frequently, and you can see how often it gets pinned to my Pinterest board. I finally made myself just sit down and do it. I love the results!!

There's really not  much else to say about this manicure, so on with the pictures, and be sure to check out everybody else's Tri-Polish entries at the bottom of the post!

July Tri-Polish #1 - flowers and dots

It's that time of the month again! What? No, wait, I mean for the Tri-Polish Challenge from Crumpet's Nail Tarts!! What time of month did you think I meant? Never mind.

This month's colors are blue, blue, and green, and I chose Pure Ice Home Run, China Glaze Man Hunt, and my new favorite green, A-England Dragon! I know Home Run is kind of a turquoise/aqua/half-green-half-blue color, but it looks blue to me, and that's what counts, yes? That and it looks really good with the other two colors, and it's a new polish in my stash, which always gets preferential treatment.

Without further ado, my first manicure of the July session of the Tri-Polish Challenge!

Were there trumpets? There should have been trumpets. Fanfare of some kind, anyway. Heh. Seriously, I really liked the way this one came out. My inspiration for the ring fingers was a manicure by Radi D:

I wasn't paying attention and my flowers weren't as close to the tip as hers, and left no room for the pretty ribbons, but that's okay, because they still came out gorgeous in my opinion.

I used Milani Whitest White for the white flowers and Sinful Shine Dark Room for the black outlines. And that's really all that can be said about the manicure, so enjoy the picture spam, and scroll down to see all the other entries for today's Tri-Polish!