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

All Things Fifties - Strawberries!

I did this manicure back in April. It was glorious springtime, flowers blooming, and I felt like polka dots. I have no idea why, but I went with it! Instead of roses, I added strawberries for a fresh fruity flavor. :) This nail art design is officially called a "skittlette", and I even went and looked up the source of the name just to share with you! Marta from ChitChat Nails gave the following definition:

skit·tle·tte:

Not quite a full skittles look, a skittlette manicure is one with at least two different accent nails. Pick any formation/order you wish, but for a true skittlette at least two nails need to be the same (the others can all be different) OR two pairs of identical nails and a different nail.

For those of you who like math/equations.  A skittlette can be any of the following:AABBC, AAABC, AABCD(in any order on your nails so that AAABC=ABCAA=AACBA)


So as I have two nails that are white with red polka-dots, and the remainder are different, this is a strawberry skittlette!

The red, white, and yellow are all Sinful Shine: Devious, Wisp, and Bananappeal, respectively. The green is Sinful Colors Exotic Green, and for a bit of change-up I used Zoya Chloe on my index fingers over the Devious. I don't really remember why I decided to do that. It looks kind of out of place looking back on it, but it was pretty! I do love looking at sparkles on my fingertips over the course of the day, and color-changing flakes are always the bomb.

Co-worker L named this one All Things Fifties because she said it reminded her of aprons with strawberries and polka dot skirts from the time period.

Purple Warp Speed

There's not a whole lot to say about this manicure. It's plain and simple stripes, but it was a fun look! I have no idea why I think of warp speed when I look at it, but there you go. My co-worker L named is Stripes at Sunset. :)

The base color is Nabi Holographic Purple (yeah, that's the only name on the bottle!) and while I know the name of the black I used is Sinful Shine Dark Room, I don't remember the name of the blue, though it also was Sinful Shine, which shouldn't make it too hard to google the name, come to think of it... Ta da! It's Alfresco.

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.

Happy Birthday Flowers!!

My birthday was back in July, and I absolutely adored the birthday card that my co-workers gave me. So much so that I did a manicure based on it that very weekend!

Isn't that pretty?! So many colors went into this manicure: the base white was Sinful Shine Wisp, but the rest of the polishes are in no particular order: Sinful Colors Happy Ending, Sinful Shine Bananappeal, Avon Absinthe, Orly What's the Password, Above the Curve Wisteria, and I used both Girly Bits Street Magic and a little bitty Bon Bons clear glitter polish (no name on the bottle) to mimic the sparkle-shine on the card. Here's a blurry pic to show off that glitter:

And here's the rest of the nails!

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...

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.

Old Fashioned Roses

This is the second manicure that my co-worker L named. She called it "Happy Forties". However, I decided to call the post "Old Fashioned Roses". I did promise, however, that I would always share her titles with whoever was reading, whether I choose to title the post something else or not.

This mani is based on one by IG@lovely_polish that I found on Pinterest.

I recreated it this manicure completely with Sinful Shine polishes. I picked up a bunch of new ones a few weeks back, and within a few days I had done this manicure. (As I've said many times, untrieds don't stay that way long on my desk!)

The base blue is a gorgeous spring shade called Alfresco. I used Wisp for the white, and then Devious for the red, In The Limelight is the green leaves, and I think I mixed Wisp and Devious to make the pink, since I don't have a pink Sinful Shine in my stash list.