Orange Conifer

I love so much about this manicure. The color, the funky plants, how much it shimmered…half of these photos were just snapped randomly but had such a cool color mix that I had to post them! I don’t know why I haven’t worn this polish again since I bought it a few months ago, but now I know what I am putting on next!

Just look at the shifty awesome-ness!

The base here is the other “pastel multichrome” that I bought to play with from POP Polish. This is three thin coats of Slick Days of Summer. Much like the pink Watermelon Bubbleslick, Summer isn’t exactly a perfect multichrome, which is to say the polish isn’t smooth like a metallic, rather it is a collection of tiny flakes which you can see based on how they scatter light. Other than that…it is pretty much perfect. It is a bright red/orange through orange to apple green multichrome, and you can honestly see all of the colors just on regular glances. None of this contort-your-hand-backwards nonsense!

I then went ahead and did some advance stamping. I decided to color-match to the orange, and just grabbed some polishes in the color family I wanted. Then I found the PERFECT stamp. Its halfway between a pine cone (hence conifer) and a flower! I die.

Colors:
~ Orange multichrome: POP Polish – Slick Days of Summer
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Light green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Dark green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Light peach: OPI – Freedom to Peach
~ Peach: OPI – Yank my Doodle
~ Dark orange: Essie – Playing Koi
~ Stamp: Moyra – 45 I Fill You

Also this stamping plate is made of amazing images. I want to color them all in…but it takes hours!! That said, I have a full week of next week (omg) so maybe I will actually get around to it. Who knows? Hope you enjoyed!

Purple Petals

More flowers! I figure it is nearing the end of spring so I need to get them posted now :-D. This was another straight forward color-in-some-petals mani. It didn’t come out quite as lovely as the pink one from two weeks ago, but I still like it!

The base here is yet another new polish. What you see here is three thin coats of Zoya Abby. I had been looking for a pale purple creme to replace my almost empty go-to of Sally Hansen Lacey Lilac, and I think I found it! It makes me a tad bit sad that this isn’t one of those perfect two-coat Zoya cremes, but it dries fast enough that 3 coats is acceptable.

Colors:
~ Light purple: Zoya – Abby
~ Purple: Zoya – Malia
~ Dark purple: L’oreal – Paparazzi Pleaser
~ Dark blurple: Zoya – Danielle
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: Moyra – 45 I Fill You

I wish I had a bit of a BETTER gradient for the purple petals (two of the purples are very dark!) but oh well! This seems to be a theme. Oops! Hope you enjoyed!

Sprouting Purple Blossom

Hand-painted floral gradient time…happy Spring! It certainly feels like it here, we had a truly impressive lightening storm followed by monsoon-level rain. I spent a large portion of my evening just staring out the window in a dark room!

Anyway, it is also new polish time! This is three coats of Little Oysters by Ethereal Lacquer. This was a limited time buy (from one of the custom groups I am a part of) and I love it! I am actually wearing it (again) as I write this. The polish itself is a bit thick, however it is very opaque and I probably could have gotten away with two coats! It is a greyed-out pastel lilac with copious pink shimmer that shifts to yellow-gold at sharp angles. It looks grey, purple, pink, and sometimes yellow.

I decided I wanted to replicate some of the cool designs I had seen online with this particular stamp, but using purple rather than a multi-color gradient. In retrospect it would have been much easier to actually do a gradient, rather than hand-painting each layer of petals directly on the stamper head! But the end result is pretty cool.

Colors:
~ Pastel purple shimmer: Ethereal Lacquer – Little Oysters
~ Light purple: Essie – Full Steam Ahead
~ Purple: L’Oreal – Royalty Reinvented
~ Dark purple: Zoya – Malia
~ Stamp: Whats up Nails – B005

Hope you enjoyed! It is a lot of fun to do stamping with just a touch extra, although in this case it took much longer to complete!

Embracing Blurple

This came out better than I expected! It is very hard to see the teal metallic stamping polish, but the colors go nicely and I have missed geometrics 🙂

When I start a manicure I generally have an idea in mind ahead of time. With this one, I just went “i want to use that one sparkly blurple with teal flakie polish” and tried to find coordinating colors. Don’t ask me why coloring in some of the thinnest lines on one of my stamping plates was deemed a good idea, but the result is pretty cool!

I need to remember to buy more flakie polishes, they have wonderful color shifts and finishes but are not difficult to remove. Also they tend to have enough going on in them that even if you paint quickly enough to cause bubbles (because rushes are a real thing) you can’t see them!

Colors:
~ Blurple glitter: Polished For Days – From the Land of Oz
~ Teal: Opaque teal stamping
~ Light purple: Sally Hansen – Lacey Lilac
~ Purple: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ Dark purple: Zoya – Danielle
~ Stamps: Moyra – 54 Matrix

That’s all for today. Hope you enjoyed!

Blooming Mauve

This mani is halfway between winter and spring: winter colors but with flowers and a butterfly! Given how cold (and snowy) it continues to be, I thought that was fitting.

This is a new-to-me polish, and I love it. For some reason I am super into shimmers right now, and this is subtle, elegant, and loaded with shimmer! What you see here is three thin coats of Quixotic Polish – It Rubbed Off From Friction. This polish is one of my only purchases from Hella Handmade Creations (I usually stick to Polish Pickup). The polish is is a beautiful dark grey-mauve swimming with pink shimmer, which also has a scattering of holo glitter. That said, while I love the color of the polish, it was a little thick and hard to work with.

I then made some stamping decals/advanced stamping (aka coloring the stamp in while it is on the stamper) using silver and purple. The color combo could have been a bit better, but it wasn’t terrible. I rather wish I had used black not silver! Or maybe simply white.

Colors:
~ Mauve: Quixotic Polish – It Rubbed Off From Friction
~ Silver: Nails Inc – South Kensington
~ Purple: Essie – Full Steam Ahead
~ Stamps: Whats Up Nails – B005, BM – XL204

That’s all for today, happy Friday! Hope you enjoyed.

Orchid over Purple

More blurple! I don’t know…I haven’t had a chance to transfer a lot of my newer designs onto my computer yet and I am running out of options. These are from early fall. And, of course, feature a darker periwinkle.

I wanted to play with floral stamps because, in general, I either want to be playing with stamps that are flowers, swirls, or purely geometric. I have a LOT of similarly themed stamping plates!

Colors:
~ Purple glitter: Polished for Days – From the Land of Oz
~ Purple: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamps: BP – L067, BM – XL472

This was fun just because the base is so SPARKLY and how often do you get to color in orchids? Not often! Anyway, hope you enjoyed, and hopefully I will get my life together enough that I can post something more winter-themed come Wednesday!

Flowers on the Diagonal

More flowers! And yes, these were supposed to go up on Friday after Thanksgiving, and instead I was distracted by buying too much polish. And too many stamping plates (who am I kidding, no such thing!). Regardless, this makes me feel better about not posting black nails for black friday :-p

More places that I love ended up having sales than I expected, but I wasn’t too terrible? I think I ended up with 9 new polishes and 7 stamping plates. Oh well!

Colors:
~ Purple glitter: Polished for Days – From the Land of Oz
~ Purple: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamps: BP – L002, BM – 616

Hope you enjoyed these glowing blurple flowers and lines, and had fun picking up deals!

Moroccan Tiles in Nude

Copycat Claws posted a blue-and-white moroccan tile design that I love and want to copy… but while I am in the hospital I should probably avoid bright blue nails! At least as I started out. So I decided that if I couldn’t do blue, I could at least try nude! (To be fair I pained these back in July, before I realized no one would care much about my nails). That said, these came out well if I do say so myself!

I used four nude-toned polishes and two shimmery toppers to make this. Since I only have one clear stamper that works well, I had to do each nail individually. It wasn’t DIFFICULT but I did take a long time!

Colors:
~ Gold shimmer topper: OPI – Ski Slope Sweetie
~ Pink shimmer topper: Sally Hansen – Platinum
~ Pastel nude: OPI – Be There in a Prosecco
~ Medium pastel nude: Essence – I Nude It
~ Mauve nude: CND – Cashmere Wrap
~ Holo shard nude: piCture pOlish – Cherish
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: BM – XL205

I’ll meet o keep in mind that I have to try this in blue at a later point! I do admit though, it isn’t very harvest-y, and unfortunately I have to admit I didn;t have time to put together a real Thanksgiving mani! But the rest of this week is at least fall-themed :-p. Hope you enjoyed!

Daffodil Garden

I have no excuse for this going up in the afternoon…I finished editing last night and just forgot that today is a Wednesday! Anyway. I painted these in early April, as the daffodils were finally emerging from the (very late) snow! I also rather like that I found a way to use this stamp that doesn’t make all my fingers look the same 🙂

Since this was painted on top of a swatch test post, I started with a different color blue polish on each nail. To make them uniform, I basically dry-brushed each color over the others so the end result was a medium light blue with shimmer in it. I wanted there to be a faint wispy cloud background, and I think it looks rather cool! You can see that best on my pinky and thumb.

After the blue cloudy background had dried, I used advanced stamping (aka coloring in the stamp while it is on the stamper) and applied it to my nails. One of my last minute decisions with this was to use a dark orange in the very center of the flowers and then a lighter yellow-leaning peach for the rest of the middle. I love how it came out! I ended up goggle image searching daffodils to make sure I had the right shade of orange (all the daffodils near my apartment are yellow-on-yellow which is not nearly as much fun), and it also gave me a chance to use Freedom of Peach again! I don’t like this color on my nails as a base but it clearly works as flower centers :-p

Colors:
~ Pastel blue: Sally Hansen – Breezy Blue
~ Light blue: Essie – Rock the Boat
~ Pink shimmer: Sinful Colors – Cinderella
~ Medium blue: KBShimmer – I’d Rather be with Blue
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Peach: OPI – Freedom of Peach
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Stamp: BP – L067

I know the daffodils have all died, but I wanted to make sure that this got posted SOMETIME in the spring! Hope you enjoyed!

Aloha

Finally, nail art and no more swatch comparisons! I thought I would open with the nails I painted for my Honeymoon back in March 🙂

Since I was traveling to Hawaii, I wanted some fun tropical nails! I didn’t have any stamping plates that were quite the correct flower, and the few hibiscus ones I have are…not the prettiest. So I tried to turn some flowers INTO something vaguely Hawaiian! I also couldn’t make up my mind between two different designs, so I just went ahead and used both. The mani ended up a bit busier than I intended (oops) but I still like it!

Colors:
~ Purple: Emily de Molly – Traverse the Skies
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ White: LA Girl – White On
~ Orange: KBShimmer – Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana?
~ Pink: Wet n’ Wild – Tickled Pink
~ Dark green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Green: Sinful Colors – Exotic Green
~ Stamps: BP – 067, Chic Peek BM – XL472

I also wish I had done some lava nails, since that may have been the single coolest thing I’ve ever seen (well, hottest really I suppose). Since my visit, the volcano on Hawaii has started erupting again, which is incredibly unfortunate for the people who live on the slopes of the volcano!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the tropical nails! Hopefully I can get my act together and actually have something to post the rest of this week as well 😀

Winged Love

In my head, the name of this mani is all Shakespeare-ified (Wing’ed Love) but I figured adding an apostrophe would confuse everyone…and I left it in normal English. Anyway, today starts my Valentine’s manis and I wanted to do something with birds!

Basically, I found this small stamp I had never used (despite owning the plate for years) and wanted to create a mani around it. That is the two doves image on my middle finger. I ended up using birds from 3 different stamping plates and leaves from a fourth. So. Many. Stamps!

This mani also uses the first of the polishes that I won from the Nail Polish Canada holiday nail art challenge! I ended up with 21 new polish (omg) about 2/3 of which I adore and 1/3 of which I would never have picked. This is one of the ones I would not have gone for. This is Once in a Blue Moon by ORLY, and is actually a nice pale blue-grey color, and is a two-coater which is great. However…it is also a frost. Can the nail polish community at large just agree to stop making frosty polishes? There are brush strokes all over the place and I would much rather see this as a shimmer or metallic, or even a creme. Also, I hate the ORLY brushes, they are far too wide for my poor pinky nail! All-in-all, I don’t know that I am going to try very hard to keep this particular color…it might end up going to my sister.

Colors:
~ Blue: ORLY – Once in a Blue Moon
~ Green: Zoya – Shawn
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Pink: Revlon – Bubbly
~ Stamps: BM – XL472, BC – 06, BP – L067, EdM – 07

Now I sort of wish I had tried to double stamp the birds in white, but it looks alright as it is! I am also glad that the border images from BM – XL472 seem to fit my nails :-).

That’s all for today, hope you enjoyed and get ready for more love-themed manis!

Shifted Average

A couple months ago I joined a group called the Polish Pickup Pack. I had been seeing ‘boxes’ for a while where every month they advertised a different set of polish but you had to buy all of them! Then PPP came along…and its actually quite cool! A whole bunch of indie polish makers each create a polish around a theme (mythical creatures, gemstones, holidays), and you can buy, or not buy, anything you want. Unfortunately, they only sell the polish for one week out of a month, and once that one week is over the polish will never be sold again. That said, I have picked up some REALLY cool polish!

The one I am showing you here is from the October theme of “mythical creatures”, although I only received it in November since it takes a while for the makers to actually bottle and then ship all the polish. Still, this polish is freaking beautiful and worth waiting for! I have found in any given month that some of the polishes are really NOT my style, and some months many are right up my alley.

This is three coats of Not Your Average Seahorse by Blush Lacquers. I have never tried a Blush polish before, but they killed it with this one! I don’t actually know how to describe this. The base is a deep navy blue jelly with a scattered holo finish. However, it also has a bright orange to gold to green shimmer that is made up of tiny flakies (wow), PLUS actual larger flakies that are green to purple to pink. It is ridiculous and I love it. I actually put it on my shelf with my multichrome polishes despite it not TECHNICALLY being a multichrome, because it doesn’t fit anywhere else!

Anyway. I then colored in a triangular stamp with some black to add a bit of contrast, and stamped in gold. I do a bit wish that I had kept the black stripes in the same location on each nail, but I was going for something a bit more interesting? Regardless, I think it looks pretty cool!

Colors:
~ Blue shifting: Blush Lacquers – Not Your Average Seahorse
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BP – L070

I bought one more polish from this particular month’s polish pickup pack that I’ll have up on the blog in a bit, and two from the December theme. Nothing struck my fancy from November. Regardless, if you are interested, you can join the Facebook group or just check out the offerings at the beginning of each month. I am a fan!

Foiled Foliage

I think I am pun-y! Well, it isn’t a pun, the title is basically just alliteration but it still makes me happy. As does this mani! It is technically still autumn…and currently the ground in Philly is completely covered in leaves. It is pretty, crunchy, and utterly ridiculous. When I walk outside I feel like I am eating leaves!

The base polish here is intended, I think, as a topper…but I wanted to make it opaque! This is three coats of Raging Fire by Born Pretty over one thin coat of a dark red base. Honestly, this polish was almost completely opaque at two coats! The final coat was mostly for my pinky, which I had painted more sparsely than the others. Despite looking uneven, the glitter was actually quite smooth after one coat of top coat. That said, the polish itself is thick and a bit goopy…good for dense flakie placement but it would have been difficult to get a light coat of polish.

The flakies themselves shift from pink/red to orange/copper to gold and emerald green at sharp angles. Since the flakes are at slightly different angles to each other, it is actually easy to get the whole color shift! It was mesmerizing.

I then made stamping decals using a left design from plate Floral BPX-L018 with Essie Good as Gold and colored in between the leaves with OPI Visions of Love. It looks quite fun and glittery! I know I could have instead just painted the leaves of the stamping decal with flakies…but this was so much more fun :-p

And, surprisingly, this was pretty easy to remove! Since they are flakies and not true glitter, they dissolve with acetone. The dark red was more painful since the color tends to stain my cuticles. If you want to pick up this flakie polish for yourself, head over to the Born Pretty Store, where you can find it on sale for $3.69. Enjoy!

Bright Patchwork

It isn’t technically winter yet! Also, as of writing this, it has been unseasonably warm in Philly. So…fall themes are still appropriate!

Although, to be fair, I think I’d find a way to use rainbows no matter the season, but since patchwork designs somehow scream “autumn” I don’t feel terrible for postponing posting these until now!

I actually painted these back when I posted the fall-themed patchwork nails (the orange ones) but these were done with stamping decals to compare. Unsurprisingly, I liked the free-handed ones significantly more, but these were so much faster!

Colors:
~ Nude: OPI – Be There in a Prosecco
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Orange: Nubar – Hot Orange
~ Yellow: Love & Beauty – Yellow
~ Green: Salon Perfect – Loopy Lime
~ Blue: Zoya – Ling
~ Purple: Sinful Colors – Dream On
~ Stamp: BM – 607

That’s it for today! Also, despite all my chatter, the rest of this week is not themed in any way (unless “things that have been sited in my painted folder for months” is a theme). Hope you enjoyed!

Georgia O’Keeffe

As the title suggests, today’s theme is paintings by the artist Georgia O’Keeffe! I have to say, her name has a lot more “e” in it than I initially thought.

Usually, for the inspired by art day of the 31 Day Challenge I just pick something that I can pretend was art. Occasionally I actually had found a painting online and used that. However, I think this is the first year that I went in with an artist in mind and tried to (loosely) recreate something well-know!

Since I had my awesome replacement floral stamping plate from the Born Pretty Store, and I had a lot of time on my hands, I decided to go with flowers. The artist that I know best who made flowers was O’Keeffe, so I went looking for paintings of hers that I thought I could make using my stamping plate. Voila!

Each nail is a different painting, some of them more faithful to the source than others. My personal favorite ended up being the blue flowers nail, then the orange poppy (which is actually a rose). You can see where my inspiration came from. I did try and make each nail background match the painting background, generally by sponging on a color over a solid base (darker blue over a pastel blue, white over periwinkle), although you really cannot see much of the base color on most nails.

Hope you enjoyed! This was a lot more fun than I expected to make. As usual, if you want to pick this up from the Born Pretty Store (and it does stamp remarkably well, you can see all the different color polishes I used to make these stamps!), you can find it for $2.59

Growing Flowers

Orange day in the 31 Day Challenge! I actually have other orange manis, but this used the MOST shades of orange so I think it goes here!

Unfortunately, this mani had a lot of problems. Neither plate I tried to use (the zig-zags and the flowers) actually stamps well at ALL, and I don’t know why I wanted to make the flowers appear to be growing when having them all the same height on my nail would have looked better! Moreover, the peachy-orange base looked super strange on my nails.

The Born Pretty Store sent me the floral plate, BP-L067 to use. And I LOVE the designs on it. That said, the first copy they sent me (the one I used here) was etched so subtly that almost no polish would work with it. I had to try with every black polish I own. I ended up contacting the store and they sent me a replacement (which obviously I did not have a chance to use with this mani) which is perfectly etched and makes me very happy. I don’t know that I’ll get around to posting it in the 31 Day Challenge, but if I do I’ll let you all know. The plate has some spectacular floral images, perfect for advanced stamping (aka coloring the designs in).

When the OPI Washington DC collection came out, there were a few polishes I really wanted, and Freedom of Peach was one of them. I didn’t own anything like it! Unfortunately, there was a reason for that. This is three thin coats of Freedom of Peach. The polish did not self-level very well at all, and the color looks quite strange on my nails! Almost a nude, but with orange in it. I don’t like it. I imagine on other skin tones it would looks better, but with mine it is completely meh.

Colors:
~ Peach: OPI – Freedom of Peach
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Lightest orange: KBShimmer – Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana?
~ Bright orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Medium orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Dark orange: Essie – Playing Koi
~ Green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Stamps: BP – L067 and X06

So, even though these are ridiculously complicated nails, I don’t love them! They are orange though, so here you go. If you want to buy the stamping plate (which again, watch for etching issues but the images are amazing) you can find it at the Born Pretty Store for $2.59. Enjoy!