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!

Halloween Sunset

I've always loved the silhouette on sunset nails, and I finally got up the gumption to try it myself this week.

As you can see, it's well into October and I'm into my Halloween nails. But these came out so much better than I expected, that even the co-worker who doesn't do Halloween at all really enjoyed them. (Of course, as long as I keep them "harvest" or fall-themed, she can just not think about my pagan holiday and enjoy the pretties. :)

The sunset gradient was done with China Glaze Solar Power, Sinful Colors Timbleberry, Sinful Colors Beau Brique, and China Glaze Manhunt. The silhouettes were done with Sinful Shine Dark Room, which has been my go-to black of late.

May Tri-Polish Challenge: Day 1

This month's Tri-Polish colors are blue, grey, and red. My polish choices for the month are Sinful Shine Break Away, Sinful Shine Devious, and China Glaze Elephant Walk.

For this manicure I also used Sinful Shine Wisp for the base.

I mixed Wisp and Break Away in varying amounts to sponge on the gradient from white to blue, then used Elephant Walk to draw branches, and Wisp and Devious to dot the flowers. I originally expected everything to show up better on the nails where the blue was at the bottom, but it turned out that the grey branches hardly showed up on those, so only the ones with the white bottoms actually looked like trees, leaving most of the nails to seem very abstract. Which isn't a bad thing, of course, as they were pretty all the same, but the ring fingers are more of the actual look I was going for.

The thumbnails I actually did intend to be rather abstract. I did larger flowers with more mixing of the red and white, and no branches at all.

All in all, I liked the way my flowering trees came out, and very much enjoyed wearing them. I didn't want to remove them to do the next manicure!!

Let's see what every one else has done with their blue, red, and grey!

Belated Week 40 - Animal Print Mani

I really didn't feel like doing zombie nails this week for the This Is Halloween challenge - while I think they would be awesome with a costume, I just didn't fancy wearing zombie nails to work with my regular office attire. I wouldn't get in trouble, but I would find myself explaining them to everyone who visited my office that day, and while I enjoy it when students notice my nails, I would be annoyed at feeling like I needed to explain why they were zombified. :P

I also don't do my nails just for this blog. This is a record of my hobby - the fact that others enjoy seeing my nail art is completely a bonus! But I primarily take pictures and keep a record just to show myself and others the progress that I've made from complete nail-n00b to nail artist, at whatever level of competence I may have managed by now.

So I decided to go back to my delayed participation in A Year's Challenge. I fully intend to fill in all the weeks I've missed - including the first few weeks before I picked up the challenge - but since I don't do my nails more than twice a week very often, there just isn't space on my hands to do both challenges. :) Even though I didn't participate in the zombie nails, I included the link at the bottom of the post so you can go see how amazing everybody else's were, and we'll be back to the Halloween themes on Friday! :)

Well, the theme for week 40, September 30th, was Animal Print Mani. So I started with this amazing photograph I found on EarthShots.org photo of the day contest, titled Moving Day by Isak Pretorious:

I was just taken by the way the colors played together - the gradient from white on the belly to the orange on the back, the slightly darker orange of the spots - just beautiful. I've seen leopard spot manicures, I've even done one, I think, but I thought a gradient underneath would be just that extra touch that it needed.

There are only four colors used in this manicure, with two more for the accent nails. I started with a base of Sinful Colors Snow Me White, and then I put a big drop of white on my plastic-lid-palette alongside a big drop of China Glaze Desert Sun, and swirled them together in the middle. Using a fan brush, I picked up the whole line of polish and brushed it sideways across my nail. It makes for a lot of clean-up, but it also makes for the smoothest graduation in colors I know how to make. My paint palette is limited in its selection of orange cremes - most of my orange polishes have shimmer, like Avon's Lucky Penny or Sinful Colors Courtney Orange - but while I thought that Desert Sun was nearly the perfect color for the cat's undercoat, I needed a brighter and darker orange for the spots. So I mixed together a dollop of Primark Beauty's neon orange with a dollop of Desert Sun, and mixed them together thoroughly. That's the color I used for the leopard's spots. Then using the dotting tool with the thinnest tip I have - it doesn't even have a bulb at the end, it just tapers to a rounded point - I used Liquid Leather to make the spots around the spots. (Okay, my wordsmith brain says there should be a word for those rather than just black spots and orange spots, but I'm too lazy to go look it up right now!)

The accent nails do have the white/orange gradient underneath, but on top also has a simple gradient of China Glaze I'm Not Lion and I Herd That. I just brushed Lion up from the cuticle to fade out about 2/3 of the way up the nail, and then used Herd That from the tips about 2/3 of the way back down. I did the second coat the same way in order to make the fade a little more unobtrusive, and *poof*! I'm done!

I just love how many beautiful colors show up in these glitters. I should have taken a blurry picture just to show how amazing they shine, but I totally forgot until I was writing up this post. I can waste a lot of time just wiggling my fingers around and watching the way the glitter changes - it's like one of those optical illusion 3-d pictures that used to be on the cover of children's books (do you remember those?) where you move them around and the picture changes so that they almost look like they're moving.

Lazy Luster

What is a nail artist to do with their fingernails, when they don't feel like making an effort? Pull out your newest glitter, of course, and make a gradient! :)

Please pardon the lack of clean-up. As the post title declares - I was being lazy! I started with two coats of China Glaze Jungle Queen, from the new On Safari collection. I've seen some awesome swatches of this polish showing a beautiful subtle shimmer, but alas, I did not see this shimmer myself on my nails. You actually can see hints of it in some of my pictures, especially this next one, but I didn't see it with my eyes!

After my nails were Pretty In Purple (since I'm definitely not a pink person!), I added a gradient of my newest glitter, Diamond Dust from Wonder Beauty Products. There could be no other name for this polish than Diamond Dust, because that's exactly what it looks like: thousands of tiny little diamond particles dusted across my nails! Don't you just love that gorgeous sunlight twinkle on my index finger in the picture above?! This is one of those manicures that I keep having to stop typing from time to time and just wiggle my fingers to watch the sparkle. :)

I used a very simple technique to make this gradient - I wiped most of the polish off the brush, and then put a very fine dry layer from about 2/3 back to the tip. Then I repeated it, with slightly more polish on my brush, from about midway on the nail, and finally I added a solid layer of polish on the final tip, from about 1/3 of the way back on my nail. Made for quite a bump on the tips of my nails, but it only took a single layer of Seche Vite to smooth out the surface. But as you can see here, there is a fair bit more polish on the ends of some of my nails! Although, to be fair, it looks huge in this picture, but it hardly feels like a bump at all when I run my fingers across it.

What do you do with your nails when you're feeling lazy? Leave them naked, paint with a single color, or just a simple art effect like this one?

Week 28: Gradient

Welcome to my little corner of hobbyland. As you probably know, I'm following a Year's Challenge that I found over on the blog I'm Still Thinking... This week's theme is Gradient, so I asked my visiting daughter what color I should use. She said red, so red it is!

I started with a base white coat so the colors would cover better, then I put a drop each of China Glaze Brownstone, Rimmel Burgundy Flirt, and Avon Ruby Slipper next to each other on my paint palette (otherwise known as the plastic lid I stole out of the kitchen ages ago and won't give back. ;) Using a fan brush, I picked up all three colors together, and painted them across my nail as one. If you use a few strokes, it blends them together seamlessly. It's my favorite method for making gradients, because the obvious lines between colors that even sponging gives you kind of irks me. Not that sponging doesn't have its place, and it looks fabulous on other people, but on my own nails, I will overdo it to the point of obsession trying to make the change gradual. So even though it's messier, I will use a fan brush almost every time. :)

Of course, I obviously didn't leave it there! I used a striping brush and Sinful Colors All About You to add some curving stripes, and then added a rhinestone in the middle. Neither the Gryffindor look nor the fact that it looks kind of like a wrapped present were intentional! As you can see, I didn't get the pictures taken until after I'd started to have some tip wear, but I have to admit that sometimes I'm just plain lazy! I also don't have good clean-up on these because 1) I'm out of acetone, and 2) cleaning up red even with acetone is a job and a half, and I just couldn't get it done well with polish remover! And I may love sharing my nail art fabs and flops with you guys, but I just didn't feel like spending an hour cleaning up a manicure that only took a half-hour to put on in the first place, when it really only looked bad in the close up pictures. ;P

Sparkling Gradients and Nyan Cats

My friend V, whose hands frequently sport the fruits of my hobby, is joining us again today. She thinks I'm a great friend to do nail art for her. But on the other hand, she lets me take pictures for my blog, AND she supplies me with stuff. Remember the "nail armor" done with scrapbooking stickers? V financed the trip through Hobby Lobby where we wandered around going, "Oooh what can we put on our nails?" ^_~ I think it's a pretty fair deal all around.

Well, she had a job interview this week (she's looking at other positions at the University to get some more experience in the different types of work we do around here) and she wanted nails to match the clothes she was going to wear. Since one should always begin as one intends to go on, we definitely wanted to do some type of nail art rather than a single-color manicure, but we also wanted to make it subdued and professional, as is appropriate for putting your best foot forward in an interview. She was going to be wearing a tan skirt and a shimmery red blouse, so after looking through my stash swatches, I settled on a simple gradient of China Glaze Fast Track and Barielle's Elle's Spell. I am really in desperate need of a red glitter, honestly. I've got red flakies, jellies, and shimmers - but I don't have any simple, full bodied red glitter polish. Next time I'm buying China Glazes, I think I'll be grabbing a bottle of Ruby Pumps. ^_^

We're pretty sure the job interview went well, but after getting more information on the position, she's not sure she's right for the job. But hey, her nails looked fabulous!

On the same evening, my daughter Brianna decided she wanted a nyan cat on her nails. She was very particular about wanting the rainbow done with my Sally Girl mini scented pastel polishes, rather than having a bright rainbow. I have only two comments to say about doing nail art on an 8-year-old girl: 1) the canvases are TIIIIINY, and 2) it's impossible for her to stay still enough not to mess up tiny pictures.

But I did my best, and she was happy enough with it that she didn't chip it all off within the day, which is what she usually does when she does her nails. ^_^ I started with a base coat of Milani Whitest White on all the rainbow nails, to make sure the colors would pop (as much as pastels can pop, anyway!) I put a base coat of China Glaze Frostbite on the thumbs for the dark blue sky the Nyan Cat is usually flying through. To create the cat, I used China Glaze Liquid Leather and Hooke and Line for the black and grey, respectively, and used the Sally Girl minis Cherry (mixed with a little Whitest White) and Banana to do the pink and yellow areas. The pictures are necessarily pre-cleanup, since there was no clean-up of any kind. It was hard enough getting her to sit still for putting the polish on her nails, there was no way I was going to be able to get her to sit still enough to take it off her skin without ruining something along the way. ^_^

Scrapbooked Talons

A while back, V and I went wandering through Hobby Lobby thinking, "What can we put on our nails?" A previous post showed one result of that trip, with embroidery floss. For this manicure, I pulled out another item we purchased on that trip, from the scrapbooking section. These decals were intended to be placed on page corners, but I decided to trim them down to decorate my nails instead. ^_^

First, for a base, I did a gradient with two new polishes I just picked up at Walgreen's the other day: Sinful Colors Zeus and Neptune. Honestly, I could have kept this as a beautiful manicure all by itself! The two colors go sooo well together - I described it to one friend as the horizon just after the sun has gone down. You still have that pale purple color along the horizon, and the farther up you look, the darker blue it gets until you start to see the sparkle of the stars shining.

One thing I am annoyed by is my inability to clean up well at the moment. I'm out of pure acetone, and I just can't seem to clean up as well with polish remover. And while I can put on straight polish well enough to not need too much clean-up, I did this gradient by putting the two colors next to each other on a plastic palette, picking them both up with a fan brush, and then painting sideways across my nail. The sponging effect has its place, but when you want a smooth blending of colors, you can't get better than painting them together with a fan brush.

I actually did this manicure twice. My first attempt with the stickers didn't come out nearly this well. I had to figure out how best to trim them to fit my nails. Also, I need to buy some of The Best Glue Ever that Robin Moses is always touting, because these stickers just don't react well to top coat. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, they were! Came out looking gorgeous, though, and everybody who saw them thought they were awesome. :) This first picture was the best one I got for color accuracy, but I included a shot of my other hand as well.

Graduated Greens

I've mentioned in the last few posts that I haven't felt very creative this last week. After my matte & glitter mani chipped (as mattes are wont to do quite quickly) I just painted my nails with China Glaze Mahogany Magic and a couple coats of Windestine's Rainforest.

She's out of stock on this color right now. No clue if she plans to make more once the current lacquer base shortage clears up, but you should check out her shop anyway for all her other awesome colors.

I was bored and didn't do any nail art, but it made for a beautiful manicure. When I started to get some tip wear, I added a gradient of dots in other shades of green, leading up to black sparkly tips.

Leaving the base of my nails as it was, with the Mahogany Magic and Rainforest, I took a medium-sized dotting tool and dotted across with Sinful Colors Call You Later. That row isn't clearly defined, as the polish is a clear base with cool green and yellow glitters, but if you click on the picture to blow it up, you can see how it adds extra sparkle and hints of yellow from the gold glitter, in between the bottom color and the first solid green.

After that is a row of Nubar Reclaim dots, then Nubar Greener, and topped off with a final row of dots in China Glaze Smoke and Ashes, and then I wrapped the tips with it since the row of dots didn't completely cover the end.

So yeah, still wasn't feeling very creative, though I think it's picking up. We'll see what shows up on my nails in the next few days... ^_^