Drops of Bunny

I know that the green and the pink that I used here were a two-polish box set from Salon Perfect that I had bought just a bit before this manicure, though since I bought it from the Clearance aisle, I don't think the two colors I bought were two that were originally sold together, based on a quick browse through the internet. It looks like I have Pocketful of  Posies and Mint Julep, which were not sold in the same 2-bottle package. But yay! I like them. I don't remember what pastel purple I used, but if you ask, I'll look through my stash and let you know.

I have no idea why L decided to name this manicure "Drops of Bunny", but hey, I'm rolling with it anyway. The only thing I would likely come up with instead is "triangles and dots" or something similarly lame.

My inspiration, in much bolder colors than my chosen pastels, was done by Nory of Fierce Makeup and Nails:

MSMD - Art Deco

It's Monkey See, Monkey Do Monday again here at my hobby space, and this week I'm mimicking the always amazing pshiiit.

As usual, my rendition is nowhere near as good as hers, but I still enjoyed having it on my nails for a while. I used NYC Purple Pizzazz Frost, Avon Mirror Shine Polish, and Rimmel London I Lilac You for the three main colors, and China Glaze Black Diamond for the black outlines. My ring finger and thumb also have Sinful Colors Daddy's Girl over the Purple Pizzazz Frost, though it's a very subtle difference, and the camera didn't capture it at all.

I just wish I could make straighter outlines. I get so tired of the little wigglies. ^_^

O Tannenbaum

My friend V had a holiday party for work this past week, and she wanted some appropriately festive nails to go with the celebration. She spent some time googling images for Christmas nail art, and she decided on a Christmas tree made with the tape method.

We started with a base of China Glaze Adventure Red-Y in the standard two coats. One coat is more than sufficient for opacity, but the second allows for a more even color and gets rid of any ornery brush lines, I find. She wanted sparkly red accent nails, so we added a nice layer of China Glaze Ruby Pumps over her thumbnails, and then topped them with Cherimoya Vernis Love Potion #Mine.

Using standard scotch tape to make the tree shape, we added small strips of striping tape across the tree area, and then we painted the trees with Nubar Greener and topped it with Girly Bits Magically Delicious for that added extra sparkle of a Christmas tree. We used Sally Hansen Celeb City and a dotting tool to add ornaments to the tree and a star-shaped glitter for the tree topper.

I included an out-of-focus picture to show just how beautifully sparkly this manicure came out!

Mint Stripes

I have no idea what brought this idea on, but it was a great manicure. Simple and beautiful at the same time, and I got a lot of compliments on it. I was pretty happy with the way it came out. Two polishes were used: Avon Jade and China Glaze Re-Fresh Mint. Most of the nails have a base color of two coats of Re-Fresh Mint, while the accent nails started with the Avon Jade.

I laid down two lines of striping tape and painted between them with the alternate color. I topcoated then to make sure I wouldn't mess up the original coloring. Once that was dry, I put down a line of non-quick-dry top coat along the accent color line, sprinkled a little glitter, and then set rhinestones along the line in alternating color patterns.

It was a spur-of-the-moment manicure, but it came out pretty darned great, I think! Though I do apologize for not getting pictures before tip-wear had set in. I was hoping for sunshine pictures, but the sun decided to hide that day and I waited for the next...but the sun didn't come out then, either, so I took pictures in my office before the wear got even worse!

Gorramit!

That's such an emotive word - gorramit! Not quite onomatopoeia, since that's words for sounds that sound like the sounds (like bam or splat), but definitely an ideophone (words that evoke a vivid impression of certain sensations or sensory perceptions, e.g. sound, movement, color, shape, or action), at least to me. It just feels like a curse, the way your mouth wraps around it. 

But you're not here for my musings on phonosemantics! What you're interested in is the fact that I won a giveaway from Sassy Lacquer, and she gave me a bottle of Nerd Lacquer!! Specifically (if you haven't already guessed!) I got a bottle of Gorramit. She also gave me a bottle of Color Club Antiquated, which looks gorgeous in the bottle, but I haven't yet swatched (since I'm out of swatching sticks, but I have more slowly heading my way from Hong Kong.)

So today's manicure is made almost entirely of polishes that were given to me. :) I started with a base of 2 coats of Nailtiques Milan (which I mentioned in the last post about having received in a giveaway), except for my ring fingers, which got two coats of China Glaze Solar Power. I put tape down the middle of all my nails except the accents, and layered on one coat of Gorramit. I decided later to add a second coat to the accent nails for just a bit more density on the glitter, but I could easily have gone with just one.

At this point, I own polishes from about a half-dozen indie polish makers, but out of the ones with a variety of glitters, (as opposed to an even layer of shimmer or microglitter, like Girly Bits Street Magic or Windestine's Rainforest), this is hands down the most smooth application, with the MOST even placement of glitters I've seen thus far, including quite a few corporately produced glitters! I hardly had to dab glitter on at all, it just went smoothly across the nail, and a couple of strokes resulted in a surprisingly consistent layer of glitter across the surface.

If you can't tell, the lines of "dots" are made from individual glitters picked off the brush with a dotting tool, and laid in as straight a line as I could manage. There are orange hexes, yellow hexes of two different sizes, and red squares - at least that I can see clearly. :) This manicure is one of those rare times that it looks on the nail exactly as I envisioned it when I designed it! I love it when a plan comes together!

I freely admit that if I could pick one Nerd Lacquer out of all of them ever produced, Gorramit wouldn't be the one I'd pick (no matter how much I love Firefly, I just don't gravitate toward yellow polish), but nonetheless, it's gorgeous, and I now understand why exactly her polishes sold so amazingly well while she was producing them. The quality is simply stunning. So many, many thanks to Emily for allowing me to own an endangered species of polish before it goes completely extinct. :)

 

 

Nailtique Nail Fail

I won a giveaway from Samariam's Swatches lately and received four packages of Nailtique polishes. Aren't these lovely?

The four colors shown, from left to right, are Shanghai, Rio, St. Croix, and Milan. So I wanted to do a manicure using all four colors! V had just purchased a package of four craft scissors in different cutting patterns because she wanted a zigzag design on her nails, so after I was done with her mani, I pulled out one of the other pretty patterns and cut some tape for me.

Despite the fact that the title of the post says "nail fail", I actually got a LOT of positive comments about these nails. My co-workers all loved them (and they're pretty reliable about telling me when they don't) but they're just not what I was hoping for. I think if I had put the Milan on the end, and used Shanghai for the dots instead, then it probably would have come out more like what I was mentally picturing. But the color difference between Rio and Shanghai just wasn't enough for the taping pattern to really show up.

I really like St. Croix, though. It's the only nude I really have, and if I used just two coats it would be great for french tipping. I used three coats to get this level of opacity.

Brown and Beige Tones

Hello fellow nail art admirers, and welcome to my little corner of the nail art world. Okay, it's more like a cubby, or even a niche, not big enough to be a whole corner. In fact, I think I'm that little weird-shaped splotch on the wall over there...

Ahem. Since I only paint my nails twice a week usually, occasionally three times, I tend to choose my work clothes to match my nails most of the time rather than painting my nails to match an outfit. Sometimes I'll plan a manicure to match what I'm planning to wear to a board meeting, but even for that, more often than not I've done my nails a few days before and didn't think of it.

Such is not the case with the manicure I have for you today! While I was considering what I wanted to paint on my nails, the thought of a cute little summer blouse I own popped into my head, and I thought of a design to go with it!

I started with a base color of China Glaze Call of the Wild, and added one coat of Essie Luxeffects As Gold As It Gets. I added two lines of striping tape, and then painted the nail with China Glaze Kalahari Kiss. I really need to find a nice pale cream for my polish palette. I then finished up with a dotting tool using Call of the Wild and another China Glaze, Desert Sun.

 

Week 36 - Tape Mani

Yet another week come and gone, and this week's theme for the Year's Challenge is tape! Now, there's two ways to use the word "tape" in a manicure. You can use tape to block off areas of your nails to paint them, or you can use striping tape on top. I did both!

I started with a base of two coats of China Glaze Hook and Line, and added topcoat on top of that. I put scotch tape across my nails as if I was going to do a french tip, and then on my left hand I did a stripe of China Glaze Reggae to Riches, while on my right hand I put China Glaze Jungle Queen across the tips of my nails.

Another lovely layer of Seche Vite to make sure the tape didn't pull up the color when I took it off, and scotch tape was again put down, but this time lengthwise and a bit off-center on my nails. On the left hand, of course, Jungle Queen was used for the vertical stripe, while the right hand got a larger stripe of Reggae to Riches. I only used one coat of each, so of course on the right hand, it created a four-block look, since RtR isn't opaque in one coat and Jungle Queen shows through.

Then I added the striping tape and another couple of layers of top coat - and for the first time in my own nail art history, I succeeded in getting striping tape to actually stay on my nails for more than a day! It wasn't until the third day that the striping tape started curling up in more than one spot.

I was really happy with this manicure. Though I will ask you to please forgive the lack of clean-up of the topcoat, as I was on vacation!

Brownstone & Beetle Lace + Bonus Mani

Hello fellow hobbyists and other nail art aficionados! Today you get to look at everybody's hands but mine! :) Well, the first mani is on my BFF V's hands, which are regular guest stars here. The bonus mani, however, is from a first-time guest on my blog, but I'll tell you more about that when we get down there. (Why yes, it is my evil plan to leave you in suspense, why do you ask?)

So, while browsing at Hancock's the other day (though honestly, I was just being a chaffeur for the actual shopper) I decided that I wanted to try doing lace on nails. I've seen others do it, and it looks awesome...but you know what? It's kind of hard to find lace that has small enough details to be worth trying on nails. And I wanted some black, but the black ones were either not tiny enough detail, or too expensive for my post-vacation, pre-payday finances. :P So I found a couple of white choices.

I'll admit to not being terribly happy about this manicure, and not being able to topcoat over the lace (which is why the accent nails got painted over, by the way, because the topcoat soaked in too much and we didn't like the result) meant that they weren't as secure as I would have liked. I thought it would be okay, since when we did a cotton floss manicure (behold, the way waay back machine!) it actually stood up to office work for several days without problems. Alas, this manicure was not so sturdy...though it might have lasted more than half a day if V hadn't accidentally soaked her nails in a kitchen cleaner with ammonia in it while cleaning her office break room...

Well, it looked pretty before then, anyway! We started with two coats of China Glaze Brownstone, and I added a coat of Hard Candy Beetle on the thumb and ring fingers. Then I cut a few little pieces of lace, laid down a layer of topcoat, and stuck them on there. Voila, manicure! Okay, okay, we also managed to get too much topcoat on the ring finger when I was trying to stick down the edges, and it made it look bad, so we painted over the lace with another coat of Beetle. I don't care for the way it looks, personally, and wanted to remove that nail and start over, but V liked it, and since it's her hands...

And now for our bonus manicure! As I said, this is a first-time guest on our blog, and it's likely to be her last time appearance, as well, as it's G, my oldest daughter, and she lives in Kentucky with her dad and other-mom (okay, legally step-mom, but she's been a great mom, no prefix, for my older three kids and she deserves the title.) She was visiting us for a month between her graduation from high school and heading off to the University of Kentucky this fall (with a full ride National Merit Honors scholarship - obligatory proud parent bragging, you know.)  While she enjoyed playing with my nail polish stash while she was here, she limited her manicures to french tips and occasional accent nails...until just before she left! I managed to get the nail art bug to bite her!

I was doing a taped manicure, and she thought the method looked interesting, so she took some and did a basic X-pattern with the tape on her already pink nails, and added purple in two of the four sections resulting. When she was done, she declared it looked like a hazard symbol...and less than an hour later, she was removing her polish, because she'd decided to try a real hazard symbol! She started with a nice coat of Primark Beauty neon yellow, some slightly more complicated taping than her original X, and added a layer of China Glaze Liquid Leather in half the taped sections. She wasn't sure how to go about doing the center of the symbol, so I took a look at what she was going for...

radiation warning symbol

...and pulled out two different sizes of dotting tools. So a large dot of yellow topped with a smaller dot of black later, and she had the following manicure:

Isn't that just awesome for a very first nail art manicure?? It was also the first manicure she sported here that she didn't chip off over the course of the next day. :P She even went so far as to touch it up a bit the next day! And she was looking over various other geeky symbols that she could possibly do on her nails in the future. I showed her the nail art blog, NailNerd.com, and she officially declared me to be the Evil!Mom. She was still browsing that blog a half-hour later...and that evening she discussed with me what she could use for dotting tools, or if she needed to buy some! ::giggle:: I love corrupting the youth of society!