Week 9 of the Year of Polish Challenge: Vintage Mint and Pink Manicure

 This was a quick and dirty free-handed vintage manicure.  I just did one coat of Julep's Alicia (that just arrived in my Maven box!) and used a nail art brush to freehand lines in Savage and then filled in the half moons and french tips with more of Savage.

Sorry about no posts!

I got a call that my grandmother died last week and just got back from the funeral.  I'll get back into the swing of things soon. 

~Char

Dior Inspired Tile Nails

As if you haven't noticed, I love recreating prints from fashion.  I loved the print of this Dior dress and it made for some interesting nails!

On these nails, I started with a base coat of Venus and then randomly started placing free-handed rounded squares in Sunny Side Up, Coco-a-go-go, White On, and Blue Lagoon in a checkerboard format making sure that Venus peeked through the edges.  For the blue tiles, I first did a base of white to help the color show true.  I didn't stick with the even, square design because its not easy to keep all the tile uniform.  I like how these turned out and had it not been for this print I doubt I would have ever put any of these colors together on my own.  The only thing I wish to do differently is to find some off white yellowish polish to use for the white tiles.  I think it would make the pattern look closer to the one on the dress.

Copper and Aqua Gradient Nails

First, I have to say that the picture below does not do these nails justice.  They are much more striking in natural light but since it was 3am, I worked with what I had.

 

I applied a coat of Venus and then starting layering on Celestial, concentrating the glitter at the tips of the nails and fading it out towards the middle.  I then used gold glitter as the intermediary and the effect is stunning! 

Updated pic:  Got to work early and took this to you could see it in the sunlight!

Periodic Life Nails

Having taught Science for three years and always a Science enthusiast, I love making some nerdy Science nails.  Hydrogen, Carbon, Nitrogen, and Oxygen are four of the top elements needed for life so I added their periodic table squares to my nails.   Lithium (Li) and Iron (Fe) are handy enough to spell out "LiFe."  This throws me back to high school chemistry but I have to share...the way to remember that Iron is Fe is that Iron is very "eff eee" or "heavy."  ;0)

Pink Holo Nails

Recently bought some Avon polish and decided the other night to give myself some pink, sparkly nails. 

 

 

These were quick.  Two coats of Venus and one coat of Fairy Dust.  Love the sparkle!

Image Plate Organization

I thought I would show you all how I organize my nail art stamping plates.  Many stamping enthusiasts keep their plates arranged by brands but just like polishes (which I arrange by color, not brand) I arrange my plates by types.  Image plates come in three types: full nail stamps, picture stamps, and french tip stamps so I made some tabs dividing the sheets by type.    The sheets I use are 40 cent baseball card sheets from a local hobby shop and hold 8 image plates per sheet.

Should I buy a few more of these large plates I will probably by some heavy duty page protectors or dividers with pockets to keep them in the binder.

Just a quick note about the image plate types.  To me a full nail stamp covers all or most of the nail.  A picture stamp is just that, a tiny picture to place on some part of the nail like a flower or star.  The french tip stamps are those designed to go on the end of the nail.  One last type of image plate that Ive noticed is image plates with lacy or scrolling bar designs.  If I get more of those, I'll probably make new category called bar stamps.

I love organization!

Wicked Inspired Corset Mani--Week 8 of the Year of Polish Challenge

One of my favorite musicals of all time is Wicked.  I finally got around to buying Sinful Colors Innocent which is a lovely neon froggy green and I had this Corset Challenge so I married all of these notions and dreamed up these cute nails.

Innocent, I warn you, does not photograph easy.   With flash, pictures of it look very yellow so both pictures here are color boosted in Picnik to show you an accurate color.

This is free-handed completely.  I didn't have the patience to wait until two coats of Innocent fully dried to use my half-moon stickers.  I just winged it.  With a small nail art brush, I made two curving lines that almost intersected to form a half moon at the top of my nails in Ebony Hates Chris.  From those lines I made two straight lines that ended at the edge of my nails, leaving a thin line of Innocent between the two corset parts.   Next, using White On, I dotted corset holes on each side of the corset and used the lovely Flying Dragon for the corset laces. Elphaba would be proud to wear this corset and it probably would make her "popular" without Glinda's help!

Stamped Paisley Nails

I had to try out my new paisley stamps from my Cheeky image plate.  

I love, love, love how well these stamps come out.  Some image plates do not transfer the intricate detail but as you can see, these do! 

50 Follower Giveaway Winner!

I wanted to save everyone the search for the 50 Follower Giveaway post and announce the winner of the Giveaway. 

Congrats to Ashley P.!!!

Ashley has 48 hours to respond to the email I just sent!

Thanks for following and I look forward to more giveaways ;0)