Glitter Flowers

For the past few years, I’ve tried to do my “honor nails you love” final day of the 31 Day Challenge after one of the manis actually entered into the challenge. This year was troublesome, because there were so many awesome designs! A few were amazing, but far too complicated. So, I settle on this!

The design is inspired by Glitterfingersss glitter day prompt. I did not want to use lose glitter, so I ended up grabbing my new-and-untried crazy silver holo glitter bomb polish, and painting on some flowers! All in all, I don’t know how much this resemble’s gliterfingerss’ original, but I still like it. It is suitably glitter and flowery, even if the base and colors are different!

The base itself is a magnificent (if overpriced) polish called 24 Karat Diamond by F.U.N. Lacquer. I recently bought three of their polishes when LiveLovePolish had a sale. They are honestly too expensive to be worth it for me, but darn do they make pretty polish! 24 Karat Diamond is small silver holographic hexes suspended in a clear base. This took four very thin coats for opacity, and honestly the coats dried surprisingly fast. I don’t love the four-coat problem, but I imagine that next time I will put it over a silver (or silver holo) base and use 2-3 coats. I also wanted to make it as opaque as I could, or I would have stopped at three coats. Despite that, this polish is MESMERIZING. I have not seen intense shifty glittery holo like this…maybe ever. Certainly not in my collection. It is as though someone took Harp On It by Color Club and broke it into individual tiny rainbows, that still somehow look truly silver. I cannot wait to play with this more!

All that said, this polish took a good 30 minutes to remove and there is STILL glitter around my nails (I just took it off). The polish itself is not particularly top coat hungry, and a single coat of Seche Vite was enough to smooth it out. I could not stop staring at my fingernails! I think this might be more of an accent nail type polish in the future, given the removal time, but we shall see!

Colors:
~ Silver holo: F.U.N. Lacquer – 24 Karat Diamond
~ Pink jelly: Zoya – Paloma
~ Purple jelly: Zoya – Katherine
~ Teal jelly: Zoya – Freida
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White

I am glad that I did not end up stamping on either the roses or the leaves, as I was initially planning. Something about this being fully free-handed makes me happy! And this is it for the 31 Day Challenge. I am so glad that I kept up! I am proud, even if this is my last year. I’ll do a re-cap tomorrow, and then on to new nail art!

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

Rose Gold Roses

I feel like a LOT of my recent manis have involved flowers, so picking something for the “flowers” prompt in the 31 Day Challenge was both easy and exasperating. That said, this mani is interesting to me, because I like the concept but I hate the polish that I was trying to model! Oops. Polishes that take more than three coats to be opaque are evil.

The design was inspired by this pin, which has no watermark at all so I have no idea who’s nails those are! But it is pretty so I wanted to try it.

I got a pink glittery polish as a gift, and I wanted to test it out. On my pointer and pinky is 4 (!!!) somewhat thick coats of Gold ‘n Roses by Sinful Colors. I don’t know if this polish is meant to be a topper or not, but it is NOT opaque enough to be worth wearing on its own. The polish is primarily lots of pink shimmer/tiny glitter with larder silver shards. The color isn’t bad, but it took soo many coats that when I added top coat the whole darn thing shrunk! My free edges have their own personal angles now, distinct from the shape of the polish on the rest of the nail.

My thumb has two coats of a matched base color with two coats of Gold n’ Roses overtop, and honestly it looks very similar to the fingers with just Gold n’ Roses…so maybe that is how it should be worn? Seems like a lot of work for a mediocre polish! Also, the polish is rose gold and silver, there is no “gold” in it at all despite the name!

Colors:
~ Pink glitter: Sinful Colors – Gold n’ Roses
~ Nude: Essence – I Nude It
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Mauve: Zoya – Rue
~ Dark pink: Love & Beauty – Pink
~ Pink: Wet n’ Wild – Tickled Pink
~ Light pink: L’oreal – Boho Babe
~ Light green: Glitter Gal – No Worries
~ Green: Zoya – Shawn

I half wish that I painted over the shimmery pink sometime while I wore this to make it more interesting, or added holo topcoat. Alternatively, I bet this would have been stunning with ILNP Juliette! I don’t need any more rose gold polishes :-p. Hope you enjoyed!

Roses and Dots

I was torn between using these for black/white day (today) or dots day. I settled, clearly, on today! Because mostly these nails are black and white if you ignore the red. And gold. 😀

They are inspired by Nails by Cassis. That said, she had smaller roses and her nails were much longer, but mine aren’t half bad! I need more rose stamps, clearly.

This mani, despite how much I like the end result, was a pain in the butt because the rose stamps wouldn’t pick up! They are from that same darn plate I used for the Day 2 flowers (which I have a replacement of, but which did not arrive soon enough for me to make these). Also the rose I chose did not have leaves…so the leaves and buds are from a totally different plate. It works, but it was painful! I want to try this again (maybe with different colors?) with a plate that STAMPS. Since I have that now. Omg. Also smaller leaves, oops!

Colors:
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Stamps: BP – L067, L018

What do you think? Are the roses (or leaves) too big?

Sunflowers

This mani is the opposite of my post from Day 2 (the orange flowers) in that here I have a new OPI Washington DC polish which I love AND a floral stamp that works perfectly.

The design was inspired by @hdinails, because I never would have thought of floating sunflowers on my own! That said, the stamp I used is not actually sunflowers, but we can pretend that they are 😀

My new OPI polish here is Stay Off the Lawn, a deep vampy green creme with blue undertones (almost a deep green-leaning turquoise). This is two thin coats, and this polish is great! It self-levels nicely, and goes on smooth. I also love the color, although I do always love jewel-tone polishes. I am really glad I bought this one.

Colors:
~ Dark green: OPI – Stay off the Lawn!
~ Green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Light green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Dark brown: Zoya – Louise
~ Brown: Zoya – Dea
~ Dark yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Yellow: WOW – #301
~ Stamp: Floral BPX-L018

I made these flowers with stamping decals (rather than direct application like I did two days ago) and honestly I like direct application better! It is more time-consuming because you have to go one nail at a time unless you have multiple clear stampers (I only have one that works) but you don’t end up with any dead space around the stamped design, or tons of bubbles. Hope you enjoyed! This is likely to be one of my favorites from this Challenge, we shall see!

Murky Pond Blooms

This started out as a comparison between my three murky gold-green polishes. As it turns out, I REALLY love this color (as it stands my #1 lemming right now is Nine Zero Lacquer Singer’s Auto Salvage, which is basically the same color as all of these but with an intense amount of glitter). Anyway, I wanted to see how they stacked up! Of course, I had to add nail art too…I was wearing a cool shirt and I decided to model my nails after the shirt I had on (which is sad because I couldn’t wear it again the next day and perfectly match my nails, but oh well)!

In a Trance by Cult Nails (ring finger) has the least amount of shimmer, but covers nicely in three coats. It is the most understated of the three, but looks the most elegant on. Fotheringhay Castle by A England (pointer and pinky) is the only one with holo shimmer, and has more of a deep/metallic finish than the other two. It is almost a one-coater, which is incredible. Wallis by Butter London (middle finger) actually has a deep blue base with copious gold glitter, with the end result being this tarnished green-gold. It is deeper than the other two, but since the base is a jelly it takes 3-4 coats. That being said, it likely remains my favorite. I just cannot get over the depth and shimmer!

I ended up sponging on black polish somewhat randomly, and then double stamping the result with a plate sent to me from the Born Pretty Store. The plate has some fantastic geometric and random element patterns! I used two of them here, one in gold and then one in black. It looks wonderfully random! The plate is BPX – L020

I ended up hand-painting some roses and leaves to finish off the design. There was a part of me that wanted to leave the mani without the flowers…but the shirt I was inspired by has flowers and I actually think it really lightened up the resulting nails!

I am not going to list all the polishes I used…suffice to say it was a lot. If you want to pick up this random fun stamping plate for yourself, head over to the Born Pretty Store! The plate is currently on sale for $2.99, and personally I love the wacky designs on it! Don’t forget my 15% off code, LY5X31!

Hope you enjoyed!

Silver Leaves and Pink Berries

I really like how this mani came out, but it took forever to plan! I knew I wanted something with white, grey, and pink…and trying to figure out what to use for the stamp vs the background took forever. I think I used all 5 nail demos on my silicone mat! Worth it 😀

The stamping plate I used here was sent for review from the Born Pretty Store, but it is full of fun leaves and flowers…both of which are a pain to free-hand. So, I am really glad this plate works as well as it does! It’ll be VERY useful come fall. The geometric pattern is from an Emily de Molly plate though.

You also cannot tell, but I actually used both a white and a silver to stamp, just to see how the variation looked! It’s most noticeable in the non-sunlight photos.

Colors
~ Grey: Zoya – Dove
~ Silver: A England – Excalibur
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Light pink: ULTA – Baby Doll
~ Pink: Wet n’ Wild – Tickled Pink
~ Stamps: Floral BPX-L018, EDM 03

If you want the floral stamping plate, head over to the Born Pretty store, it is currently on sale for $2.99! Don’t forget to use my code, LY5X31…although I don’t think it can be applied to things already on sale, sorry!