Watercolor Nails

I love participating in nail art challenges, albeit completely on my own. I get to try so many new techniques; day 15's challenge is watercolor nails!

Watercolor makes me think of...water, of course. And water, in this case, made me think of dragonflies:

Alas, I cannot remember AT ALL which polishes I used for the watercolor effect! I know both the green and blue were shimmer polishes, but that doesn't help much, since I have a TON of blues and greens! I know I used OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls for the base, a waste of one of my more expensive polish purchases; I could have just used Snow Me White. And the dragonflies were applied using Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Black Heart, Kleancolor Metallic Orange, and a dotting tool. I was happy about the discovery of using a dotting tool for the wing shapes; I just dotted, and without lifting the tool, dragged toward the body of the dragonfly!

I ♥ Stamping!

Day 14's challenge was stamping...ooh, my favorite nail art technique! 

It's so hard to tell from the picture, but this was actually a jelly sandwich under the stamped vines. I used Pure Ice Free Spirit as my base color—not a jelly, but I wanted a firm foundation for the color! I added Sinful Colors Call You Later over that, and then added Nina Ultra Pro Pucker Up atop it. Pucker up is a neon duochrome sheer, so it's sort of jelly-ish in its translucence. I stamped with BM-312 and Konad Special Black. I loved how crisp the vine image came out!

St. Patrick's Day Nails

Yeah, yeah, everybody else showed off their St. Paddy's looks before the 17th. My manis always get posted days and days after they're on my fingers. There you have it.

Day 9 called for a saran wrap mani. I've had about a 50% success rate with this technique, apparently due to the fact that what is in my head doesn't always translate well into real life. As was the case with this one, of course...

I started with Petites Lime Freeze as my base color. I can't decide what I think of this polish. Far from being lime, the color is such a delicate, shimmery celery green, but it's too sheer for my taste. It wasn't going to matter much here, though. I covered it with a layer of a homemade franken (Verdigris) and then "saran wrapped" it off. So far, so good: good contrast, same color family.

Here is where my RL mani began to deviate from my imagined one. I really wanted to attempt some freehand shamrocks, and I really wanted to stick with the challenge, and I really thought Kleancolor Metallic green would show up against the mottled background. Uh, so much for reality. Let's just say it didn't; let's just say it looked like a leprechaun had pooped on the grass.

 Time to salvage this mani! I ended up doing another layer of saran-wrapping with the Kleancolor, which pretty much hid Verdigris, but I didn't care anymore. I decided to top it with a coat of Sinful Colors Call You Later, a great green and gold glitter topper. Final result:

My fingers look ridiculously red here. Not true to life, not even the way they looked on the computer I used to edit. Whatever.

Close-up of right thumb to see the saran wrapping and glitter a bit better.

In the sun. Man, oh man, is that Kleancolor Metallic Green bright!

I left the look alone for 24 hours, then jacked it up with some black flames from Mash-48, chosen by my elf of an almost-seven-year-old. Pic is blurry because I couldn't be bothered to wait until morning to get an outdoor shot. (If nothing else, I stand a chance of getting some award for Laziest Nail Blogger with the Crappiest Photos!)

Irish Nails!

Yet another challenge I was a bit stumped by was Day 28: Inspired by a Flag. I'm not a patriotic person, and the American flag seemed too complex for my skills, anyway. I got to thinking about my Irish heritage (among all the other things I'm a mix of), and the fact that my oldest daughter is completely enamored of everything to do with Ireland. So, I picked the Irish flag, a fairly simple one that is nice and bright:

I gave all my nails a coat of Sinful Colors Snow Me White, as three of my nails would have white, and the other two colors I chose are rather sheer.  I topped the white ones with Finger Paints Well-Cultured Pearl, my index with Sinful Colors San Francisco, and my ring finger with Pure Ice Hot Tamale (I find myself falling back on that particular orange quite a bit!). For my thumb, I pulled apart some Born Pretty dried flowers and rearranging them to look like four-leaf clovers. And in honor of the legend about St. Patrick chasing all the snakes from Ireland, I stamped the snake image from Mash-50 with my frankened green stamping polish and then carefully painted the universal symbol for "no" or "forbidden" or whatever in black. Pretty cute, I think.

Inspired by a Pattern

My first thought when I saw "inspired by a pattern" for Day 26 was some sort of clothing pattern: floral, plaid, stripes, polka dots, houndstooth check, ... But when I Googled "pattern", this image popped out at me:

Oh, I love it. Nothing too original, but this green is beautiful! Not too hunter-ish, not too emerald, and I love the swirls peeping out from behind the snowflakes. And here in SC, man, do I wish we got more snow!

I don't have this green in my arsenal; the closest thing I had was Sinful Colors Rise and Shine. The label on the bottom says matte, but to me it seems to dry looking a bit like all those spiffy rubber finish polishes I've seen on blogs. The closest I could get for the swirls was to stamp Mash-40 with a shimmer over that rubbery goodness, as I was not in a million years going to keep mixing little dots of Rise and Shine with just a touch of black to get a darker green. I used another Sinful Colors polish, Gorgeous. Oh man, I was tempted to stop there with the swirls. I've never done a tonal stamping mani before, and it was so elegant. But, further up and further in! I stamped with BM-323 and (yet another) Sinful Colors Snow Me White.

I had a hard time capturing the swirls. I can see one glinting on my thumb and the darker effect I was looking for on the other fingers in the first pic, and all shimmering a bit behind the flakes in the second pic. Not too bad for someone who is determined NOT to buy a new polish every time I don't have the exact color in my stash.

Lucky Dragon

My sweet hubby sweetly sold the reading/back support pillow he'd gotten for my bday and let me use the money for indies instead! I had to find a way to make $20.50 stretch as far as possible. I found SillyLilyPolish on Etsy. She had some really great glitter mix polishes with fun names, her mini bottles were just $3, her shipping was great, and she had a deal running for a mystery surprise if you ordered $15+! I got 6 polishes plus my bonus surprise polish for exactly $20.50. Winning!


For Day 17: Glitter, I used Sinful Colors Slate and then topped it with a sponged gradient of Slate and SC Rise and Shine, a beautiful kelly-green-with-a-hint-of-blue matte shimmer. On top of that I used one coat of SillyLilyPolish Lucky Dragon. Lily's polishes are so glitter-loaded, and what I can see through the bottle never gives me a true picture; there's always at least one fun surprise: an unexpected color, an unusual shape, a holo I thought was just one color...  I'm picky about my glitter placement, so I did fish quite a few of the larger pieces off the brush with my smallest dotter and place them strategically. That's just the way I am. I don't do random very well. I didn't manage to find very many of the medium purple hexes, so they're kind of a bonus on a few of my nails.

I haven't been very lucky with my flash shots lately. I probably need to build a lightbox or something. Blah. I don't really care enough to do it, since these are just for my personal enjoyment.

natural light, shade-ish

sunlight

flash, w/ some stupid shadow—argh!

Mani Happy Memories

Day 14: Flowers. Hmm, how to fit that into a Christmas mani? Poinsettias, of course. But I was getting a little bored with the bright red and bright green already. I was staring at my bin of green polishes, and it hit me! In the mid-80s, my family lived in Miami for 2 years. Our whole neighborhood was full of stuccoed houses with mica flakes mixed into the stucco so that all the houses sparkled. Very beachy, very...Easter eggish. Our house was mint green. I kid you not. Mint green with sparkles!  OK, there's a point, and I'm getting there! My mom found out that in Miami's sub-tropical climate, you could plant all those lovely poinsettias from coworkers, etc. right in your yard! So, out in front of our minty, glittery house was a flower bed filled with a whole row of bright red poinsettias. Hence, my flower/Christmas mani from a memory of my childhood:

I couldn't capture the glittery silver very well; my photography skills are minimal. For this mani, I used Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Mint Sorbet topped with a nameless silver glitter from The Supply Source. I used acrylic paints to make the poinsettias and leaves (although technically the "flowers" are leaves!) and for the centers I dotted on Supply Source's gold glitter polish with a homemade dotting tool. I really like how this turned out!

Xmas polka dots

Day 11 of the 31 Day Challenge (which I am stretching to about a hundred days...) is polka dots. I was pretty happy with my results for this one! I still need to practice my dot gradient, but since this was my first try, I'm OK w/ it. I used Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Red Carpet as my base color, and dotted on  Pure Ice Free Spirit and Finger Paints Well-Cultured Pearl (jacked up w/ some extra Glow powder from Sheer Miracle) with dotting tools I made by pushing ball-headed straight pins of different sizes into the eraser end of a few pencils.

Merry merry!

My Not-Favorite Mani

We have this plastic knife/cake cutter/pie server around the house that's listed on the website where we buy our wheat berries as "My Favorite Knife". Only, it's totally not what I thought it was going to be, doesn't do what I'd like it to do, and has been re-christened in our home as My Not-Favorite Knife. Today's mani reminds me of that knife.

Day 10: Gradient Nails. I've done several gradients since I started doing more than just slapping two coats of some loud Sinful Colors shade on my digits and calling it even. I LOVE gradients. But I told myself that everything between Turkey Day and Christmas was going to be Christmas or winter themed. Hence the snowflakes for Day 8. Hmm, I thought, a red and white gradient will look like something bled out on my fingertips. Green and white reminds me of spearmint. I hate spearmint. And red and green mixed, as any artist worth her salt knows, makes...brown. Not so appealing in a gradient mani. Ooh, I thought then, if I painted my nails white and did a red to green GLITTER gradient... That seemed to have a lot of potential.

But, as in the case of My Not-Favorite Knife, it's totally not what I thought it was going to be and didn't do what I'd like it to do.  I think the biggest problems were 1) I didn't realize just how sparse my red glitter polish was, and 2) I hadn't yet tried my green glitter polish, which turned out not having the same size particles as the red. The red has teeny squares. The green? It looks like someone had a pile of minute particles of glitter dust/shards/crapola left over and said, "Hey, let's dump this in bottles and sell it to some fool who thinks she's getting a deal!" Um, that fool would be me. I bought these at The Supply Source. For $1.50 apiece, I really shouldn't complain. But I'm going to, because that's how I roll. They smell weird. The formula of some is thicker than others. The particle size is not uniform! (Base color, btw, is Finger Paints Well-Cultured Pearl.)

So, after much dabbing, blending, layering, and sweating, this is what I ended up with:

sunlight

flash

blurry flash

I know. Not at ALL what imagined in my warped little head. My Not-Favorite Mani.

Kitchen Table Nail Salon

All my girls wanted they're nails done last Friday. It took me an hour and a half to "do up" everybody; I jokingly told them I felt like I was working in a nail salon!

Olivia (14) chose CG Starboard stamped with Orly Buried Alive and Mash plate 44.

Isabella (10) was getting parakeets for her bday, hers are painted with Pure Ice Free Spirit and a franken I made from Sinful Colors Tokyo Pearl and Midnight Blue, stamped with budgies and bows in Konad Special Blue and a green I frankened from Konad Special Yellow and Blue with plates BM-315 and  BM-317.)

Kristiana (6) wanted blue and white skittles (Revlon Indigo Night and Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear White On) stamped with doughnuts and cupcakes from BM-308 using Konad Special White and Blue.

 I thought it was cute/funny that all my little women picked blues and greens! I, on the other hand, went way out of character for Day 7: Black and White Nails. I went minimalist! I can almost never bear to do anything this simple on my nails (or in the pages of my kids' scrapbooks—too many good pics to choose from!). 

I decided to use Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Black Heart for the base color because the thought of cleaning that much Konad Special Black off my fingertips was daunting. I used the gradient image from BM-301 and Konad Special White. This was one of the BM plates that I had trouble with, even with two replacements! It leaves a huge bare spot in the middle of the image unless I scrape with a metal scraper... I then sponged some Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear White On at the tips to even things out, cover bare spots, and make the tips even whiter. I love how it turned out, especially as everyone in the family had the same initial reaction I had: "It looks like snow falling!"

flash

inside, no flash

sunlight

Now, if South Carolina would just GETsome snow this winter!

Recovery From Failure

Um, maybe. Really, I need to take pics of my failed manicures, for no other reason than to give myself a good laugh. For Day 2: Orange Nails, my oldest daughter wanted me to finally use the faux dried flowers I got from the BornPretty Store. I, on the other hand, was hoping to achieve a verdigris look by stamping with this image from BM-301:

 Blurry, but whatever.

"Ooh", I thought, "feminine and floral with accent nails of edginess!" Uh, wrong. (And dangit again! Why don't I take pictures of the crappy manis?) What happened was that after a base color of Pure Ice Hot Tamale (which my oldest, Olivia, gave me for Mother's Day ), I stamped the crackly-looking image with a homemade mixture of Konad Special Blue and Special Yellow..."homemade" special green! (I can franken successfully as long as it doesn't involve glitter.) My ring fingers and thumbs ended up looking muddy and brownish.  Not so pretty in combo with the shimmery orange with teal flowers.  So, this a.m. I removed the stamped ones (dangit, double dangit for not thinking to take pics!) and did accent nails with Sinful Colors Kissy (so beautiful, I want to eat it!).  Ahh, much better. Trust me.

Natural light

Flash (No idea why clean-up around my ring finger looks so bad in this one. It looks fine above and in RL.)