Cheery Mani

Challenge Day 13 calls for a cheer-yourself-up mani. I've been itching to use both my Zoya Robyn and the spring images on BM-302. I couldn't decide between the bunny and the full-nail image of birds, snails and...what are those? "Suessian" trees? So I went with both in a skittle mani.

Obviously, Robyn is my base color, except for Kleancolor Metallic Fuchsia on my pinky. (It's much more metallic IRL, and so beautfiul!) I stamped with Konad Special White, and then used Sinful Colors Snow Me White, Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Lightening, and the fuchsia for the dots, stripes, and flower on the bunny nail. I couldn't figure out how to incorporate the accent/art colors into the full-nail stamp image, which is really the only thing I didn't like about this look.

My first Zoya!

I had done a mani for Day 7 before I left for Hilton Head, but in the hoopla of getting six people out the door, I forgot to get pics. It was pretty spiffy, I thought! In honor of the beach trip, I chose a gradient with L'Oreal Walk on the Beach and Sinful Colors Mint Apple with a coat of Pure Ice Busted over the top. It looked like the ocean washing up to the shore, with the beautiful lavender sparkles of Busted like the sun glinting off the sea and sand. Alas, no documentation, and I just didn't feel like repeating it when I came home from the beach. Why? Because the bestest husband ever let me pick out my first two Zoyas and an OPI at Ulta on the island. Woohoo! I got Zoya's Robyn and Jem and OPI Ski Teal We Drop.

So, for Day 7's Gradient, Ombre, or Skittle, I ended up with this skittle featuring Jem. The accent and stamping are with Color Show Bold Gold—have I mentioned this polish is, in my opinion, only good for stamping?! Check out the streaking and bubbling on my ring fingers.

Please also note the wonky stars on my right index. This was my third DOOVER of that finger; I could not get that darn image to stamp on that finger for all the tea in China! And my right pinky image isn't centered, but by that point, I didn't give a flip.

This shot is solely for the purpose of showing off the gorgeous pinky-golden flecks in Jem!

It's late, hubs is waiting on me to watch a movie with him, homemade mocha ice cream is calling from the kitchen, and I can't be bothered to list all the stamp plates. Cheers!

Wingfeather mani

Day 24 was "Inspired by a Book". I based my manicure on Andrew Peterson's On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, book one of the Wingfeather Saga. My oldest's best friend introduced us to this series of books, and we all have been enjoying them immensely! Andrew Peterson is a brilliant writer, in my humble mommy opinion. His books are beautifully written kids' fantasy novels that are just as entertaining for adults. They are super-clean without being cheesy, full of adventure and good v. evil clashes as well as ordinary human interaction made intriguing by his elegant style. Think I like 'em just a little?

Here is a summary of the story, and here is my nail art representation of it:

Index: Janner, the main main character, is a writer and Throne Warden responsible for the safety of his brother. I stamped BM's "love" image onto cream for this. Middle is Leeli, Janner's sister, blue for the sadness of being crippled by the enemy, vine's with lavender flowers for her crutch, and a musical note for her role as Song Maiden. Ring: Janner's brother Tink (Kalmar) is the young High King of Anniera and an artist, so here is a drawing of a tree with a calligraphy-style pen. My pinky is for Peet the Sockman, a homemade peach/nude polish topped with white and red stripes for the sock and a black V to represent the claws at the end of his arms. My thumb is symbolic of the powerful sea dragons.

And this hand: Cream with just the bottom portion of the "love" image for Oskar Reteep and his love of books/knowledge on my pinky. Ring: green and a muddy gold for the Fangs of Dang. Teal jelly and turquoise glitter sandwich stamped with waves for Janner's grandfather Podo, a salty old sailor. Index: royal blue with a (faint) crown for Janner's mother Nia, queen of the lost kingdom of Anniera. And lastly, cream with big pawprints for Leeli's pet and protector, Nugget.

 The sea dragon nail is my favorite. I love this Sinful Colors Kissy, an amazing teal loaded with turquoise glass flecks, topped with Color Club Worth the Risque, although the holo of this stamped image doesn't photograph well.

My least favorite is the "Nia nail". Kleancolor metallics are beautiful, but bleed/seep through any image stamped on them! The crown was originally gold, and I was so proud to get it centered well, but as soon as I topcoated, the crown faded. It's not a total loss, as I think the faded crown could represent the fact that Nia is queen of a country that no longer exists.

Wonka Nails!

Freehand nail art is generally above my pay grade, and there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that anything I did was going to actually look like what it's supposed to represent. I was going to go really simple for Day 23: Inspired by a Movie. One of my favorite movies is Notting Hill, and I was going to use my delicious L'Oreal Notting Hill Blues and maybe just stamp some heart pattern over it.

But then I got to thinking how much my kids love Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and how much more they'd enjoy seeing me represent it on my little canvases than they would some grown-ups' movie they don't know anything about. So, I busted my butt, painting non-stop for 1.5 hours to achieve this very amateur but very under-15-crowd-pleasing skittle mani:

left hand

right hand

Thumbs: an Oompa Loompa (w/ some serious glare!), and chubby Augustus Gloop, which may be my favorite for no better reason than I love how the hair and cheeks turned out!

 Left index and middle: Violet Beauregarde and a "bad egg" on the scale for Veruca Salt.

Left ring and pinky: Mike Teavee on Wonka Vision and Charlie Bucket burping his way down in the Bubble Room; I love that the holo showed up in both of these!

Right index and middle: you can see the lapels on Mr. Wonka's jacket, but the sun completely washed out his big lavender bowtie, and of course there's the edible teacup, and the chocolate waterfall. In retrospect, I should have texturized the grass, maybe with a reverse cling wrap and two shades of green?

Right ring and pinky: a sponged rainbow and BM-306 stamped image for all that CANDY, and the dorkiest representation ever of a famous golden ticket. I was trying to use a teeny strip from a catalog for words, and lined it up wrong so that all you get here is the measurement for a dadgum curtain!

These are nothing like all the amazing, lifelike portraits from so many nail artists out there, but I worked really hard and am pretty excited about these!

Christmas cracker!

Cracker being my hubby's "swear" word, I thought it very alliterative for this post's title. Because I just remembered there was a mani between the bday/Xmas one and the Xmas day mani!  It was a last-ditch effort to cram in a bunch of the Christmas manis I never got around to. So, my few-days-before-Christmas mash-up:

Kind of a crappy pic taken with my phone, but I've been forgetting since I got sick to take pics of my art! Left to right: cherry candy cane ('cause the Kleancolor metallic red bled through my white stamping), glitter globe, abstract tree, gingerbread dude on a cookie sheet (his wife was on my left hand ), and purple topped with Chunky Holo Black (which didn't even show its awesomeness here) because of the baby King!

Excuse the grody dry skin/hang nail on my thumb. I cannot seem to get rid of those! Too much mommy-ing: dishes, baths, meal prep, etc. NOT that I'm complaining. If I'd known these digits were going to become canvases, I'd have started taking better care of my hands years ago!

Birthday Haul Part 1: or, Glittah City!

"We now interrupt your regularly (or not so regularly) scheduled nail art challenge to bring you this random post..."

Yesterday was my birthday! 39...ugh. One more year until I'm flippin' 40 years old. Ack. Barf. On a more cheerful note, my kids all got me awesome polishes, some I'd been coveting for months, some I didn't even know I wanted until I got them! And I didn't just want them because my kids gave them to me; they really are great! Lots of shine, shimmer, and GLITTAAAAAAH! I had to take a break from the nail challenge

Left to right: Olivia got me Wet 'n' Wild Shine Wild Card and SC Superstar, Ian gave me Wet 'n' Wild Shine Bijou Blue and SC Call You Later, Isabella gifted me the long-awaited Notting Hill Blues, and Kristiana gave me Nicole by OPI Rainbow in the S-Kylie, which will forever be known to her and me as "Party in a Bottle". The Different Dimension Space Camp mini is there just b/c I added it over one of my bday skittles, and I hadn't used it yet, and I loooooove it.

Notting Hill Blues on thumb (topped with Call You Later, which I didn't realize 'til it was on that it has green and teeny gold glitters—so much depth!) and ring (+ Rainbow/Party...), Superstar topped w/ Space Camp on index (I love the formula on Superstar: a jelly that stays true to it's "jellyishness" but still leaves no VNL w/ just two coats!), Bijou Blue on my middle and Wild Card on my pinky (both topped with Rainbow/Party...). Wild Card is pretty sheer, and I still had VNL at two coats, but I think a thin third coat would remedy that, and it is a shade and finish I didn't have. The Bijou Blue was thinnish, but a medium 2nd coat was enough to achieve opacity, and although I thought I had something pretty close, it is in fact different enough that I don't have any dupe.  Flash:

Outdoor (overcast)

 I love ALL the polishes my sweeties gave me! Later, I will be posting parts 2 and 3 of my birthday haul, polishes I bought via Amazon.com with gift cards from my best friend and my bestie SIL!

Simply thankful

Technically, Day 8 of the 31 Day Challenge was supposed to be metallic nails. But I was ready to move on from the black and white gradient (bottom half of post) two days before Thanksgiving, so since I'm doing this challenge on my own, I decided to do Day 9: Rainbow Nails first! Besides which, sometimes there seems to be a fine line between shimmer and metallic, so some of these might qualify either way. On to the rainbow!

I was daunted by the idea of rainbow nails at first, thinking all my atrophied-by-motherhood brain could come up with was gradients or cutesy little rainbows ending in puffy clouds on each nail. Ack! But then I realized I could do skittles of different autumn-y colors for Thanksgiving, and it would make a pseudo-rainbow of muted jewel tones! LOVE.

Next dilemma: not having exactly the right shades/finishes of some colors I wanted. Playing around with polishes, I had stumbled across the fact that Sinful Colors You Just Wait, which I first took to be a sheer peach shimmer, has a duochrome to green that makes black polish look like green metallic! Oh. my. GOSH! I decided in the end to layer it over NYC Flat Iron Green, instead, just b/c I didn't want any stray black edges showing, although Flat Iron Green is almost black anyway. And the purple I used on my pinkies is almost too dark to differentiate, too, so I layered Sinful Colors Bali Mist over it.

Another issue: Everything but my thumb and ring fingers showed brush strokes. I HATE brush strokes. I'd seen someone's neat trick (on Pinterest, maybe?) of sponging a final, thin layer of the same polish over metallic or shimmery polishes that have brush strokes. Genius, totally worked!

Yet another issue: The shimmer in Sinful Colors Midnight Blue is much finer than all the other colors I used, so while it is just about as perfect as a polish can get (in my book, anyway!), the slightly different texture/finish was glaringly obvious. I decided to sponge on a layer of Pure Ice Calypso...without first painting a layer on...because I'm lazier than the day is long...which is why my ring fingers look a little blotchy with Midnight Blue peeping through at full strenth. But live and learn, now I know I can't cut that corner any more!

sunlight (Check out that coppery shimmer!)

Not so much feeling the love on the indoor light pic, mostly b/c I'm too frickin' lazy to pull out my camera tripod and the pic is fuzzy. That's OK, because...

TADA!! Flash: possibly one of my fave pics of my nails EVAH.

Nina Ultra Pro Brandywine, Sally Hansen Lustre Shine Copperhead, NYC Flat Iron Green snuggled up close to its partner in crime Sinful Colors You Just Wait, SC Midnight Blue paired with Pure Ice Calypso, and Wet 'n' Wild Megalast Disturbia (love the name) in tandem with Sinful Colors Bali Mist

Despite the fact that I'm notorious for not being able to wear my nails w/o some sort of design or art, I loved this one and didn't want to take it off! I could not stop staring at my nails, which in my experience, is not something a log of nail bloggers say about a hand full of cheapo polishes like these. I have a serious love of deep and/or bright colors, so maybe that combined with all the shimmer was love at first sight...and second glance...and...

I'm SO blue!

And by that, I mean that blue has been my favorite color for as long as I can remember.  Especially royal blue, like the Revlon Colorstay Indigo Night (stupid, stupid name)  I used for Day 5 of the 31 Day Challenge. It almost covered with one coat, and I knew that layering over it with Pretty Polish Spectraflair Top Coat and Pure Ice Don't You Wish (Um, lack-of-punctuation alert, people at Pure Ice!) and then stamping with Konad Special Black would hide any teeny bald spots. I used a variety of plates for these royal blue holographic skittles, but they're all from the Bundle Monster 2012/300 series set of plates.

left hand, flash

 right hand, flash

right hand, sunlight

left hand, sunlight

my pretty polishes

Man, I love blue polish!

Zoo-rific Skittles

I don't know which says more about me, the fact that I just made up an idiotic word (zoo-rific?!?!), or the fact that I succumbed to that prevalent habit: the overuse of hyphens! (Cue look of horror.) Anywho...

Meeting my dad at the zoo tomorrow for his bday, and did these in honor of the occasion:

 Left to right: zebra (duh), snake (not a great shot), giraffe (LOVE), and for my son, whose bday is Friday, his fave: moon jellyfish

Thumb shot: intended to stamp a Bundle Monster owl on that there tree branch, but instead I'm going to be emailing said monster and asking them to replace a shoddy plate from which I cannot pick up ANY image with ANY polish.  Grr. So, I was going to freehand an owl. (My freehand techniques need a bucket load of work!)  About halfway through the grey parts, I thought, "Hey, a koala would be just as cute, and need fewer details."  So, lazy woman's way out gives birth to Blinky Bill (that one's for you, Daddy).

Too many polishes to list, including a frankened nude (better than a Frankennude!) and a couple of colors I mixed up at my polishing table (a.k.a. TV tray I ruined with polish) because I was too stank lazy to go get grey for the eucalyptus lover or pink for the jelly. There's like a sub-theme of laziness tonight, eh?  Oh well, that's it.  Good evening, self.