Autumn Fallen Leaves

I'm out of town at a work conference, but I managed to take a few minutes to edit these pictures before I left and upload them so I could work on the blog post whenever I felt like taking a short break from the conference. I'm glad I did, too, because I'm really proud of this mani and I'm happy to be able to share it now rather than having to wait until next week.

The base color is one I just picked up, that I didn't realize was a matte until I used it (though I topcoated it on this manicure, since that was how I expected it to look and didn't plan for a matte) - Sinful Colors Leather Loose. I really love rich brown polishes - I always think my favorite color is green, but my nail polish collection says differently, since brown is by far the most common color - and this one is no different. It has a similar gold shimmer to China Glaze Midtown Magic, though the base brown isn't as dark. MM frequently gets mistaken for black when I use it as a base color, but there is no mistaking Leather Loose as anything but a rich, thick brown, with a deep reddish gold shimmer.

As a matte, it dried to an interesting chalky brown color. It doesn't really remind me of leather in anything but the texture, but I look forward to experimenting with it in the future. But the matte startled me, and wasn't what I had in mind when I started this manicure, but with topcoat the polish looked exactly like I expected it to out of the bottle. Absolutely beautiful.

I used a lot of different polishes on these leaves, and I may have forgotten one because I started putting them back on the shelf before I realized I hadn't written them all down yet. I started out drawing a variety of leaf shapes with Sinful Colors Snow Me White, and then for the various shades of red, yellow, and orange, I know that I used (in no particular order) Primary Beauty Neon Orange, Sinful Colors Courtney Orange, Let's Talk, and Beau Brique, and China Glaze Cranberry Splash and Salsa. Sinful Colors Coffee was used for the brown stems and veins.

I didn't have any particular type of leaf in mind. In fact, I pulled up a diagram on the internet with a dozen different leaf shapes on it (google search "leaf shapes" gives you plenty to choose from!) and just tried to make a variety of them. I didn't manage to do teeth-edged leaves very well, though I tried a few times, but I was happy enough with the end result.

I also wanted a variety of leaf colors, but I wanted the overall result to be predominantly red, because I had already chosen my wardrobe for the conference, and while my outfit bases were white, black, and grey, I used red uniformly for the color splashes so I could mix and match my pieces and therefore pack less for the trip without worrying about anything clashing. So, mostly red, but very Autumn, leaves on my nails. :) I think this is my second-best manicure to date (second, of course, to the violet flowers I did from the BCTC tutorial!)

Framed Leaves

When my friend V wants to come over and do her nails, but doesn't know what she wants done on them, we usually head to my Nail Art pinterest board and she'll pick out a handful that jump out at her for me to choose between for which one or ones I feel like doing that day. Usually we'll use that picture as an idea or place to start, but we seldom actually mimic them closely. I do that often for my manicures, but V usually has an idea where she wants "this, but with this, or that, or changed this way..." However, she loved this nail art so much, and the colors, that she wanted it just like this one. Or, you know, as close as I can come with my growing abilities. :)

So here is the nail art which she loved so much, from Finger Food Nails:

However, given the length of her various nails, we decided to put the accents on her index and thumb rather than ring finger.

I discovered first that drawing a border on nails? WAY harder than it looks! We didn't take pictures of her right hand because I did that one first, and her left hand, which I did second, came out so much better. I apologize for the tip wear - it was raining the day we did the manicure, and I no longer take pictures inside my house because the lighting is horrible, so the pictures were taken after a day of hard work at the office! I would make it more of a priority to make a light box if it weren't that the lighting in my office at work is actually pretty good, so when I can't take pictures outside, I just do it on my lunch hour, but V works on the other side of campus from me. A bit inconvenient for her to come over for pictures at lunch! :)

We used KleanColor Military Green for all the green nails and the framing and outlining, and the white base for the accent nails was my new go-to white, Sinful Shine Wisp. I used China Glaze Solar Power (I think I did, anyway; I failed to record which colors I used, but I'm sure of all the others besides the base yellow) to fill in the leaves, and topped them with a thin swipe of Sinful Colors This Is It for that nice shimmer.

As seems to often be my problem, I go too big. I don't leave enough white space (literally white in this case, but it means the empty background space in an image) when I'm creating a manicure. These would have been better if done with my thinnest detail brush (I have one that I have cut down to only about three or four bristles) and smaller leaves, more spread out. I really like how delicate the leaves were in FingerFood's manicure, but that's an area where I continually strive for improvement. I've been doing this nail art hobby of mine for nearly a year and a half now (I did my first ever nail art on the Winter Solstice of 2011) and I've come a long way, but I've got a long way to go to what I'd like to be. But since it really is still just a hobby, and not an obsession, I don't actually spend a lot of time practising any of this stuff. I just like to do my nails. I'd get better at it faster, I'm sure, if I put the time and effort into practising my manicure designs on my swatching wheels until I'm completely happy with them before putting them on my fingers, but I usually just jump right into it! Which keeps it fun, but makes me glare when I post these close up pictures on a blog. 

Still, it's a good record, and (I hope) inspiration to others out there who are having fun with it but not nearly as good as some of the amazing artists out there. If you look at too many of them, you can despair sometimes when you see your own work on your own hands. But having a record of my progress lets me and, I hope, others see just how far I've come over time. And if I can do it, anybody can do it!