Poison Apple

I was inspired by @polished_pomegranate to make a poison apple manicure. I am glad I found her inspiration post! I had put together a Halloween manicure that I did NOT like, and wanted to trade it out, quickly, for something simple. This allowed me to use my drippy stamps, (even the skull!) which I don’t know that I have touched before! And it looked both creepy and cool. Overall, excellent!

Colors:

~ Red-gold multichrome: ILNP – Greatness
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamps: Lina – Make Your Mark 02

This week also begins what I consider to be the REAL countdown to halloween (in terms of nail art). Although everyone else has been posting since September, and for some reason that is also when halloween decorations sprung up in our neighborhood. It is excellent, but I do NOT remember this level of dedication from my childhood!

Halloween Vortex Drip

This is a weird complicated manicure. I was (yet again) out of Halloween nail ideas, but I was playing with one of my cell-producing polishes and decided I would just force that to become a manicure. I started making decals (one for each nail) with yellow, orange, red, green, and purple (due to their halloween nature), and adding the nude cell polish and a black creme. The end results were widely varied with regards to density of color, ease of flow, and number of cells, and looked super random on my nails. I was going to stamp over them, but decided that a drip design to make it look like a halloween-colored vortex was the better solution. I have no idea what I was thinking (it was maybe 3am) and the end result is super weird, but it was fun!

Colors:
~ Red: Zoya – Sooki
~ Orange: Forumla X – Incandescent
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Purple: OPI – I Manicure for Beads
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Nude spot: Baroness X – Sand Ahoy!

I don’t know that I will ever do something quite as abstract as this. No one had any idea what I was attempting and overall my nails mostly looked like slime! But I guess that is part of the fun of Halloween…do weird stuff! Anyway, hope you enjoyed!

Frankensteins

Happy day-before-Halloween! Today you guys get to see my favorite of the Halloween-themed manis I did this month, Frankenstein’s monster and the Bridge of Frankenstein!

The design was inspired by @paintedpolishbylexi. Everyone else does stitches over the green, but I loved the idea of black-on-green drips instead!

A bit of trivia…despite all other nail art, the Bridge of Frankenstein does NOT in fact have a bow in her hair in the movie! Just the bilateral white zags.

Colors:
~ Green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White

Sadly, I will not be doing much to celebrate Halloween this year since I will be taking that darned 9-hour-long exam on Wednesday morning, so I cannot stay up at all! And would likely be too anxious to have much fun either way. I will, however, be watching Casper the Friendly Ghost, since my husband and I were determined to continue our tradition of one kids Halloween movie per year (last year, despite being on our mini-moon two days after our wedding, we managed to watch the Nightmare Before Christmas). Enjoy!

Paintbrushes

See, for the theme of Day 27, artwork, I decided to go with things that work to make art…in this case paintbrushes. I have no idea if anyone other than me would ever be able to identify what they are without me telling them! Oops.

To create the bristles I painted my nails a medium brown, and added a bristle-like stamp with a nude tone. I then dry-brushed on a bit of each of my intended colors to create an effect as though the paintbrushes had been previously used for the specific color.

Then I added the blobs of color and a little white crescent to indicate that they were shiny. I decided to matte the ‘brush’ part and make the paint part ‘glossy’ just for fun!

Colors
~ Brown: Zoya – Dea
~ Nude: Zoya – Chantal
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Yellow: WOW – #301
~ Green: Salon Perfect – Escape to Neverland
~ Blue: Zoya – Ling
~ Stamp: BM – 314

So, do they look like paintbrushes? Did I succeed? 🙂

Dancer the Reindeer

*Provided for review

Today, for your viewing pleasure, I present Dancer from Paint Shop Polish. Candi (the maker of these lovely polishes) sent me two bottles from her winter release…Dancer and Donner! I love reindeers 🙂

Dancer is a deep brick red shimmer. The polish went on easily, was opaque in two coats, and dried rather fast. Although the polish looked very streaky on application, it dried completely flat! I was impressed. This polish leans a bit more orange than any of the deep reds in my collection, and has a beautiful shimmer in the light.

I decided to compliment Dancer with reindeer! How could I not? And snow. Because reindeer and snow just make sense. I even have a reindeer tutorial that will show up on Nail It! Magazine soon!

Colors

• Deep red: Paint Shop Polish – Dancer
• Brown: Zoya – Louise
• Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
• White: Zoya – Purity
• Red: City Color – Red

You can find Paint Shop Polish on etsy, Facebook, and twitter. There are so many lovely colors to choose from! If you don’t want to invest a lot of money, Candi offers both mini and full size polishes, including of Dancer.
I also have a 10% off coupon for you guys! Use the code PSP10 on your next order, and enjoy!

Also, don’t forget to enter my giveaway! Ends in two days 🙂 (US only)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Textured Drips

This mani looked better in my head than on my nails. The plan was to take a creme base (light orange, medium orange, dark orange/red) and add the three orange/red Frosted Gumdrops polishes over top like drips. Unfortunately, the colors matched too well and the drips almost weren’t visible! Maybe I should have outlined them.

Regardless, I was not terribly pleased with this mani, and ended up removing it after only a day. The prettiest part were the two gradients…the frosted gumdrop gradient and the creme gradient (I even added matte drips on my thumb, but you can’t tell at all).

Luckily, since i used so little glitter polish, this came off easily! And I didn’t use a top coat of course.

Colors:

• Light orange creme: Wet n’ Wild – Sunny Side Up
• Dark orange creme: Sinful Colors – Courtney Orange
• Red creme: City Color – Red
• Light orange textured: Julie G – Tangerine Dream
• Medium orange textured: Julie G – Sugar Rush
• Dark orange textured: Julie G – Hot Cinnamon

They might not have looked fantastic, but they were bright!

Melting Rainbows

This week I really wanted to play with holos and pastels (since I just went and bough a blue and purple pastel to cover my craving for the new Zoya line)…and I narrowed it down to drips or gradients. Since I did gradients for the last mani, I went with drips!

This was pretty fast to do, although I made a few critical errors. Mostly just on my ring finger, where I started with white (I forgot I wanted to do the holo for the base and drip down cremes, I was debating doing a holo drip over cream), then added a dark green rather than a light green, which flooded my cuticles (darn cheap polish), and when I tried to layer a lighter green over it, it streaked. Oh well. The white highlights ended up smearing when I added top coat. I declare this finger a lost cause.

Colors:

• Pink holo: Milani (3D) – Digital
• Pink: Sinful Colors – Pink Forever
• Purple holo: Milani (3D) – Hi Res
• Purple: Sally Hansen – Lacey Lilac
• Blue holo: Milani (3D) – Cyberspace
• Blue: Nail Art – Blue
• Green sparkles: Sephora by OPI – Watermelon Scented over Wet n’ Wild – Sagreen the Teenage Witch
• Green: Nail Art – Green
• Gold sparkle: Petites Color Fever – 24kt Gold
• Yellow: Revlon (fast dry) – Electric
• White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White

The only true holos are on my thumb, pointer, and middle fingers, but since it’s snowing here and will be for the next few days, there is no sunlight to show you how they glitter! A blurry shot was the best I could do.

Drip manis are easy and a lot of fun. I’ll have to try this again soon when I’m not rushed for time! And maybe get myself a green holo from somewhere. I have sadly few green polishes (other than very dark greens).

Enjoy! And stay tuned for EVEN MORE RAINBOWS.

Halloween Part 1: Webs

I interrupt the regularly scheduled run through of my “old” (aka made in the last three months) nails, to bring you a set of two nail arts that I did very recently. The first is going up today, Halloween part 1. Part 1 was removed just last night. My newest mani (what I am wearing right now, Halloween part 2) will go up on Halloween!

Part 1 was inspired by a few things I saw online, and just a general desire to do cute/creepy nails. I love Halloween.

My attempts:

-Pinky: spider (doesn’t look great, stay tuned for Part 2)

-Ring: chevrons…ended up looking somewhat mashed and creepy, but I thought it was fitting

-Middle: web. This was matted for the final product (see the last picture)

-Pointer: drips. I had been seeing this on the internet and wanted to try it. It was so much fun to do! Going to try again with different colors at some point in the near future

-Thumb: pumpkin. Stay tuned for Part 2 for much better pumpkins

Enjoy!

I attempted the ‘chevrons’ on my right hand with much less black…more the pattern I was going for (turned out the image i was trying to copy was stamped, and I don’t have any stamping plates or tools, so no luck there) but I actually like the creepier/blacker version on my left hand better!

Oops. I had been forgetting the label…corrected. To lazy to go back and fix. I only have two extra days off because of this hurricane afterall…

And finally, the thumbs. I thought they were cute but needed a bit of help color-wise! My poor orange is not exactly opaque 😦