Rainbow Sprinkles

This is a really old manicure. I couldn't find the pictures for it for a while, and when they finally showed back up on my computer, I was well into the I-don't-wanna-post phase. But hey, I actually have the names of all the polishes I used!!

The white base was done in Milani Whitest White. The red dots on the thumb are done in China Glaze Salsa, and the glitter they're dotted with is Pure Joy. Orange is brought to you by Wet N Wild, The Clock Strikes Orange, and glitter-fied with Linderella's Cauldron Drippings. The middle fingers used Sinful Colors Exotic Green and Green Ocean, while the ring fingers are done in China Glaze Frostbite topped with Blackheart Royally Screwed. Last, but not least, the pinkies are dotted with Wet N Wild Who Is Ultra Violet and topped with dots of Max Factor Fantasy Fire. Phew, that's quite a list!

I didn't take pictures of the right hand, as it looked nearly identical to the left hand. Dotting tools balance the skill, or lack thereof, between the abilities of the dominant and non-dominant hands! I did take a handful of different pictures, at different angles and focus to show the pretty glitters as best I could.

Mocha Marble

This manicure was done with a watercolor technique, but my co-worker L named it Mocha Marble, and since it does look kind of like marbled stone, I stuck with it. :)

I think I started with a white base, but the polishes used for the colors are Joe Fresh Mocha, Chian Glaze Kalahari Kiss, NYC Mulberry Street, Elevation Polish Temperance, and Sinful Colors Coffee. I have no more words to add to this one, so bring on the pretties!

Random Triangles

When I did this manicure, I was looking for inspiration, and I pulled up February's Tri-Polish challenge to see what the colors were. I haven't done the 3PC in quite a while. This month's colors were pink, grey, and brown, so I thought I'd see what I could do with that. I realized, looking through my myriad polishes, that I don't have any light grey polishes. I corrected that later that week, of course, but I didn't have a light grey for this day.

I started with a base of China Glaze Stone Cold, and I drew fairly random triangles in Sinful Colors Over It and Coffee. I love that brown, but it didn't show up as well as I would've liked against the Stone Cold. Still, I enjoyed the shine of the pink and brown against the matte of the granite color.

Bronze Roses

As contrasted with my last post, I was really happy with this manicure! It came out nearly exactly as I envisaged it and I loved it. I just felt like a brown manicure, so I picked out a few shiny, sparkly browns and went to town.

This ended up being an entirely China Glaze manicure, not through intention, but just through happenstance. My best browns are almost all CG's, apparently! The base color is Fast Track, and I used Brownstone, Unplugged, Mahogany Magic, and Harvest Moon in various places to create the roses and dots.

I don't know if it was because I took these pictures when the sun was setting, or just camera responding to the glowing brown polishes, or a combination, but I had to adjust the color on every single photo of this manicure. They all came out extremely orange! I think this one below was the closest I came to the real-life colors, but I did the best I could on all of them.

Acutely Angled Rainbows

This one is a personal nail fail, though it came out looking kind of cute. It was a fail because it wasn't the way I wanted it to look when I designed it in my head. This is an example of why I tell people that I'm not creative. I'm good at implementation, not design, which is why so many of my best manicures are copied from other people's creations.

I started with a base of Sinful Colors Cinderella, and then I just drew triangles in the following rainbow of colors: Sinful Shine Devious, Wet N Wild The Clock Strikes Orange, China Glaze Solar Power, OPI Jade is the New Black, Sinful Shine Break Away, and Wet N Wild Who is Ultra Violet? I started with a different color on each nail, so that they layered differently; for example, on some nails the last triangles added were red, while on another nail the top layer of triangles is orange, or yellow.

I think I might try this one again at some point, but instead of doing two triangles of each color, only do one. I think it just came out too busy. And I didn't get the triangle lines as crisp and precise as I would have liked. Ah, well, no one is perfect, and definitely not me!

Don't You Make My Brown Eyes Blue...

Okay, I don't have brown OR blue eyes, but I was so sick and tired of winter colors that I really wanted a nice, rich brown on my nails. However, the day I did this manicure the snow was sooo beautiful and delicate that I just really wanted to do snowflakes. So what you get is the first few snowflakes falling on rich winter soil!

I started with a base of Sinful Colors Coffee, and then layered Max Factor Fantasy Fire over it. I put two stripes of China Glaze I Herd That on each nail, and then I used Sinful Shine Wisp and my tiniest detail brush to draw snowflakes as delicately as I could manage. I even looked up the various crystal structures that snow can come in before drawing them! I also traced a hint of China Glaze I'm Not Lion along some lines of the snowflakes to make them sparkle and come alive. However, all that glitter and shine made it really difficult for the camera to focus, and quite a few of my pictures came out blurry. Here's one of the out-of-focus pictures to show off the glorious color of all the glitters, though!

I tried twice to draw snowflakes on my right hand, and they came out horrifically blobby so I gave up and just left them with the Coffee, Fantasy Fire, and I Herd That stripes, but I have a hard enough time getting pictures of my right hand to focus, as my left hand is shakier holding the camera. With this manicure, I failed entirely to get even a single decent picture of my dominant hand. But here's a few more pictures of the pretty half!

Poinsettias

It's the quintessential winter/Yule/Christmas manicure. Poinsettias are almost a requirement for winter nail art. It was also the topic for one of my earliest nail art attempts. Look how far I've come from this mani I did back in December two years ago!

How far I have come! And a concrete example of why I blog my nail art in the first place. It's both a record to me of my work, and hopefully encouragement to new nail artists who might come across this and see where I started and how I've progressed with practice. I'm nowhere near artists like Base Coat, Top Coat or 10 Blank Canvases, but I'm very satisfied with where I am and how I've developed with my skills.

Today's manicure started out with a base of Sally Hansen White On. The poinesttias are done in Zoya Karina and Blaze, and detailed with Sinful Shine Dark Room. The leaves were done in OPI Live and Let Die and detail lines were done with OPI Jade is the New Black mixed together with a touch of White On. The center berries were done with dots of Dark Room topped with dots of China Glaze Solar Power, and I used the dotting tool to press down into the wet black lacquer under the yellow to make texture. I wouldn't often dig into the previous coat of paint when doing a manicure, but for the center of flowers it tends to be a nice effect.

I like to show both my left hand and right hand work, to document how good and how bad I can be in one mani. Or more just to be honest in recording my work over the years, honestly. So here's the art on my dominant hand, for all to see just how badly I draw with my left hand.

I really love this manicure, and my Christmas enthusiastic co-worker literally squealed. I have to say, I'm really really happy with my left-hand thumb. I just love the way it came out. That and my middle finger on that hand are my favorites.

 

Presents Under the Tree

I started with a base of Sally Hansen Celeb City. The trees are done in Sinful Shine Amazonian, the stars at the top were fished out of Wet N Wild Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the ornaments are a coat of Blackheart Party Action.Oh, and the garland was done with China Glaze I Herd That. The presents are done in China Glaze Cranberry Splash and Frostbite.

Candy Cane Watermarble

For my first manicure actually done in December, I give you candy canes! As the subject line states, I did these with the watermarble method. I started with a base of Sinful Colors Tokyo Pearl and then the watermarble is Tokyo Pearl and China Glaze Cranberry Splash.There's not much else to say about it, so without further ado: pretty pictures!

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!)