Dry Marble Firemaze

So, this was a LOT of fun. I know the prompt is water marble, and this is a dry marble, but it was incredibly fun to put together and the two water marbles that I made for today both came out rather poorly, so you get this instead! After, what is the 31 Day Challenge about if not weird pretty new things?

I started with a yellow base, and dry marbled the rest of the colors using a fan brush. I think this might be the first (or second) time I have ever even touched my fan brush. The red and dark orange got overwhelming (fanning on colors was so fun!) so I added some additional yellow at the end. After all that, I added a maze stamp. Voila!

Colors:
~ Pastel yellow: Maybelline – Citrus Collide
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Orange: OPI – Freedom of Peach
~ Dark orange: Essie – Playing Koi
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: BM – 609

I think this is the first year I haven’t posted a real water marble for water marble day, but you guys will just have to forgive my dry marble replacement :-p. Next Monday’s (assuming I get it put together) will be excellent so be excited!

Half Moon Lace

In general, I despite half moon nail art. I just don’t get it. At least make the design pointed or something fun! But just a half moon? Blegh. That said, after stalking the internet for an ungodly amount of time, I found a concept I didn’t hate to recreate for the 31 Day Challenge.

For this, I stamped the white curlicue design first, then stamped the half-moon in pink. The pink I chose was not nearly opaque enough to stamp that way, but it was just dark enough to provide a framework to freehand the actual half moon. Then it was just a bunch of dots-in-dots (as always, my favorite) and voila!

Colors:
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Pink: Essie – Sunday Funday
~ Stamps: Moyra – 50 Ornaments 3, 60 Cuts

Hope you enjoyed! As stated, this isn’t my favorite but at least it is colorful, and combines a few different techniques.

Resist in Teal

I really think these look like resistor bands! Of course the colors are all wrong, but I don’t care either way :-D. They are also wonderfully lines and therefor works for Geometry day in the 31 Day Challenge.

The design was inspired by Marine Loves Polish. I even used the same colors for the most part because A England is the best at opaque polishes!

Colors:
~ Silver: Darling Diva – Diamond
~ Teal: A England – St George
~ Green: A England – Dragon
~ Moss: A England – Fotheringhay Castle

Hope you enjoyed! The rest of the posts this week are not quite as awesome but next weeks are fantastic, I promise 😀

Scales of Many Colors

Personally, this is one of my favorite designs this year for the 31 Day Challenge. Today is animal day, and I figure a mermaid is an animal! And of course, what could be better than a pastel rainbow mermaid 🙂

Loosely inspired by @nails4cocktails, and I kinda love it! It came out much more vibrant than I expected, I tried to do a pastel gradient set to start but the colors just never got dark enough. But then the gradients were done and they were too bright! So I added back the pastels as part of the advanced stamping and voila! It works 😀

Colors:
~ White: LA Girl – White On
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Pink: Revlon – Bubbly
~ Light pink: Wet n’ Wild – Tickled Pink
~ Pastel orange: Maybelline – Bleached in Peach
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Pastel yellow: Maybelline – Citrus Collide
~ Green-yellow: Essie – The More the Merrier
~ Green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Pastel green: Zoya – Tiana
~ Pastel mint: Glitter Gal – No Worries
~ Blue: Zoya – Rocky
~ Pastel blue: Zoya – Blu
~ Light blurple: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ Purple: Zoya – Malia
~ Pastel purple: Sally Hansen – Lacey Lilac
~ Stamp: hehe – 024

This took a LOT of colors, and for once they are not all Zoya polishes despite being all cremes! Unfortunately, my Maybelline pastel polishes are running on empty, so someone needs to release an excellent pastel rainbow set at some point. And yes, I know we are about to get fall/winter collections and that they will not be pastel, but I can hope!

Dots and Roses on Teal

This caused me soooo many headaches. You can’t tell, but I repainted my pinky 4 times. I started with it teal (because I wasn’t paying attention and I usually start with all my nails the same color). I dinged that, so I painted over it in white. That took 20 minutes to dry so I seriously dinged it and removed the whole mess. Then I just painted it white…and while finishing my other hand accidentally hit the drying white polish against TAPE so it was all over. I finally cleaned it fully (instead of just wiping off the polish), added base coat and painted it white, carefully. And then moved very very slowly for about 20 minutes until it was dry.

Other than my pinky, this was not a very difficulty manicure! The lines are a stamp, and everything else, while freehanded, was pretty easy. The hardest part was keeping the dots straight on my ring finger and thumb. I do wish I had made the roses larger on my middle finger, but I was having fun with tiny roses! And I am proud of my ring finger. The roses almost look respectable 😀

The design is lifted directly from Paulina’s Passions. It turns out this is from 2014, which tells you a bit about how long it was sitting in my untried ideas! Yikes

Colors:
~ Teal holo: Powder Perfect – There be Mermaids
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Light pink: Zoya – Jordan
~ Pink: Love & Beauty – Pink
~ Dark pink: Zoya – Ciara
~ Light green: Zoya – Josie
~ Dark green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Stamp: Born Pretty – Halloween L004

I realize that Monday’s post was also a bunch of circles and dots, but this one had MORE dots, so I am posting it for Dot Day! Hope you enjoyed!

Rainbow Bubbles

This manicure was FUN. It was super messy and took forever to clean up, but I really enjoyed making it!

I had been staring at the rainbow + circles manicure by de_briz for months. I watched the video.  I wanted to do it. I tried using her technique on my thumb (although honestly I think her white polish wasn’t dry yet when she did this? That is the only reason I can think that her polish really spread) and it looked ok but not great. It also doesn’t help that my yellow jelly polish, despite being almost full, is thick and gloopy. I also only had pink/yellow/blue/purple to work with, and I wanted oranges and greens so I needed to go heavy on the yellow. Then I just starting messing around.

My white base was dry and top coated already, so I knew it was safe to play around on top of it. I starting putting massive blobs of polish down on my nails in a mostly random pattern (but with lots of yellow) and tried to tilt my nails to get the polish to flow. That failed. (Clearly I have been watching too many of those “liquid art” and “flow art” videos!). Then I gave up and just starting shaking my hands, hard, in various directions. That worked! The nail polish started moving, and blobs of it fell off my nail (on mostly the mat, but also the desk, my other arm, and the poor innocent polish bottles). The end result was bright and looked surprisingly like watercolors. I repeated the process on my other nails, although I clearly used too much purple on my ring finger and I accidentally scraped half the color off my pinky and had to half-redo it (which only somewhat worked) while top coating my other hand. Yikes!

After that i was just adding lots of circles. Unlike de_briz, I don’t own the prefect circle plate, so I had to improvise. In the end I used three plates and then added dots with a dotting tool just to round it out. I kinda love it!

Colors:
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Pink: Zoya – Paloma
~ Yellow: Esmalta da Kelly – Yellow Soap Bubbles
~ Blue: Zoya – Frida
~ Purple: Zoya – Katherine
~ Stamps: Moyra – 60 Cuts, Whats Up Nails – B015, BP – L002

Anyway, if this isn’t suitably rainbow for day 9 of the 31 Day Challenge, then I don’t know what is! Enjoy 😀

Thick Vampy Curls

This was designed to match an outfit, which was a shimmery purple shirt with thick black velvet swirls over it. The nails matched perfectly! Of course, because the nails were matted, they also fell apart faster than I would have liked

Regardless, they are suitably purple/violet for Day 6 of the Challenge! They also reminded me that I need to wear more matte nails…at some point in the future when I am not wearing gloves all the time or squirting cleaning solution on my hands in the hospital.

Colors:
~ Purple: Zoya – Valerie
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Matte: KBShimmer – Oh Matte!
~ Stamp: Moyra – 50 Ornaments 3

Hope you enjoyed! Things get more fun next week…I think the entire week ended up being a collection of some of my favorite recent manicures!

Green Glaciers

This was a multi-step process. I wanted to make glaciers because I was traveling to Iceland. So, I decided to start with a greyed shimmery base…but used Memory Palace which is really a teal. I put away my grey gradient, and grabbed a teal gradient instead to make the glaciers. The end result was rather cool…but very teal-green. I asked my husband what I should add and he goes “northern lights”. Now, the northern lights are usually teal/green, and obviously that wouldn’t work, so I coarse-sponged on a tiny purple/red/yellow gradient. That looked surprisingly cool (thanks husband!) but it needed more oomph…so I added some rainbow flakies using Festival. Voila!

I did end up using one of the new items from the Born Pretty Store to make the mountains (the darkest green thin line). I wasn’t sure these would stamp because the lines are so darn thin, but it worked just fine! The plate has a whole bunch of awesome mountain/waterfall/water full nail images that I used in a different mani that you’ll see soon.

Colors:
~ Pastel teal holo: Cadillacquer – Memory Palace
~ Dark teal: A England – Saint George
~ Teal: Zoya – Cecilia
~ Light teal: Zoya – Wednesday
~ Lightest teal: Glitter Gal – No Worries
~ Purple: Zoya – Margo
~ Red: Zoya – Sooki
~ Orange: KBShimmer – Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana
~ Yellow: WOW – #301
~ Flakies: piCture pOlish – Festival
~ Stamp: Born Pretty – Chinese Style – L003

So thats today, Green Day in the 31 Day Challenge! And also glaciers to honor my trip to Iceland (which btw is beautiful). Hope you enjoyed!

Pastel Tri-Angles

Happy 31 Day Challenge! This year, like last year, I am still only going to post three times a week, but on the days I post it will (hopefully) match that days prompt. As today is day 2, the prompt today is “orange”. Here we go!

This was surprisingly hard to make. I wanted pastel colors, but my pastel polishes are not the most opaque things! So, in order to make decals that I could cut into geometric shapes and put on my nails, I had to use more than expected layers of polish. The end result was a bit chunky and required two coats of top coat.

Colors:
~ Nude holo: CbL – Froge Feiertage!
~ Pastel pink: Wet n’ Wild – Tickled Pink
~ Pastel orange: Maybelline – Bleached in Peach
~ Pastel yellow: Maybelline – Citrus Collide
~ Stamp: Moyra 60 – Cuts, BP – L002

I can’t wait to see what everyone else is posting! If you want to join along, check out More Nail Polish’s links and instructions :-D. Happy painting!

Abstract Sky

Ok, so this isn’t QUITE a fail, it just isn’t nearly as good as I expected. Of course, I now own the item I wanted to use (gold glitter for stamping) but I didn’t have it when I painted these! Oops.

The base color here is two coats of Gaia by KBShimmer from Jan 2019 PPP. This is a deep blue jelly that appears cobalt due to all the glitters: iridescent shards that shift teal to purple and coarse silver holo glitters. Both are plentiful. This polish takes just a bit of spreading due to the flakie load, but it dries down nicely on the nail! I love it.

The design was inspired by de_briz. So, I started with Gaia, then layered on some MORE flakies (just for fun) and then stamped some dots in black. Sadly, my plate with swirly dots does not stamp well! This is doubly sad because the swirly dot design is literally mine…I had done it years ago and when the “make your own” stamping plate series became a thing I submitted it, and it got in. So this pattern was designed by me…and this plate hardly stamped. So, I started in black (which is not visible at all) and then tried to go over it in gold…and it was patchy and awful. So I top coated and tried to convince myself it was good enough. However, if I am anything in the nail art world, I am the woman who adds too many dots…so I fixed it by going over every dot by hand. With the same gold. I have to say, it looks much better. I also didn’t bother top coating at the end since the gold polish is a quick dry that actually lives up to its name, and I do love vaguely textured nails!

Colors:

~ Blue glitter: KBShimmer – Gaia

~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black

~ Gold glitter: Sally Hansen – Go for Gold

~Stamp: BM – 607

~Flakies: orange/green from the Born Pretty Store

That’s it for today! I’ll have to try something like this mani without spending an extra hour free handing the dots next time. Live and learn!

Orange-y Swoopy Flower

This is a week of fails before we get to a month of good things (the 31 Day Nail Art Challenge)! Which is to say, prepare for a week of things I don’t love very much.

This came about because typically the color combo of yellow-orange-pink-neon purple is a good one! And my nails were short enough to use the MoYou plate I have. Ultimately, this did not come out how I envisioned at all.

Colors:

~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment

~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun

~ Pink: Zoya – Margo

~ Purple: Zoya – Landon

~ Stamp: MoYou – Pro 02

That’s it for today! I think the next two posts this week are slightly better, but at least this one is colorful?

Murky Geometry

Sometimes you have a polish that you like. It is quite pretty and you know you really want to use it…but it is such an awkward color that you never know what to pair it with! That is my primary problem with this polish. So, obviously, I am stuck reaching for black, white, gold or silver. This time, I went with gold.

I don’t know why I went with a geometric set of designs except that it had been a while since I last used this stamping plate! The combo came out rather nicely, although it was hard to see the design in sunlight due to the reflectiveness of the gold polish! :-p

Colors:
~ Purple-grey: Quixotic Polish – It Rubbed Off From Friction
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamps: Moyra – 54 Matrix

That’s it for today! This was a pretty straight forward and simple week. I am in the process of deciding how much I can contribute to the 31 Day Challenge this year…we shall see! I have a hunch its going to be a “on days I usually post just try to post something theme-appropriate” like last year.

Pink Swoop Gradient

I was sent to pink polishes to review from the Warm Tea Series from Born Pretty. These are very small bottles of quite potent stamping polish. I do wish I had been given two different color families, but theses ones gradiented together well! I wanted to test them over a dark base to prove that they, especially the lighter pink, would work. Voila!

Of course, in retrospect, it might have been a better test of their ability to not put them over something quite so glittery, but I have to admit the effect in the sun was dazzling! This has also convinced me that at some point I really do need to go out and buy some more dedicated stamping polishes. My regular cremes would never be able to do this!

Colors:
~ Purple holo: Emily de Molly – State of Mind
~ Light pink: Born Pretty – Warm Tea, Cherry Blossoms
~ Dark pink: Born Pretty – Warm Tea, Crimson Cheeks
~ Stamp: EdM – 21

Hope you enjoyed! If you want to pick up either the lighter pink or the darker pink stamping polish you can find them here for $1.99 each. That said, keep in mind that these are very small polish bottles, only 6ml!

Abstract Minimalism

You guys, I don’t know what this is. Born Pretty Store sent me an un-asked for plate to review…and it is a mix of weird abstract flowers/animals, funky cats, and nude people?! I can’t wear naked people on my nails to work! Artistic it might be but appropriate it is NOT. So, I grabbed the only three images on the plate that I could even imagine what to do with, and googled “minimalist rose”. The very first hit is the rose on my middle finger – I think Born Pretty did the same thing and just turned it into a stamp! Anyway. All the google images were white-on-black so I just decided to reverse that idea and leave it alone. This plate was, at least, very well stamped. Even the tiny dots transferred perfectly onto my pointer finger!

Of course, I can’t make a mix-and-match with only three images. So I used two of the scribble images from a different plate (my ring finger and thumb) in an attempt to tie this all together. All in all I do not love this manicure. My style tends towards the orange and colorful. However, it gave me a chance to use this black glitter…I don’t think I have touched this polish in 3 years! And it still works perfectly. Score one for Sinful Colors 🙂

Colors:
~ Black glitter: Sinful Colors – Secret Admirer
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamps: Born Pretty – Artist L004, Lina – Make Your Mark 02

If you want to see what you can do with some artistic minimalism/naked people, Artist L004 is available at the Born Pretty Store for $3.99. Good luck?

Shimmer Lace with Subtle Multichrome Accents

That is one hell of a title. But I couldn’t think of a better one! We have a pastel nude shimmery base (which is quite pretty), some lace, and then some awesome accents in a pastel multichrome and silver holo glitter. I honestly kind of love this manicure!

The base is two coats of Anthos by Sayuri, one of the monthly offerings (I cannot remember if this is from PPU or one of the other monthly polish groups). Anthos is a pastel pink that leans mauve, which is just filled with scattered holo, some tiny red glitters, and lots of translucent orange/pink flakie shards. The fact that it covers in just two coats is icing on the cake. This is a beautiful subtle sparkly polish, perfect for work! (Adding a bunch of glitter is less work-appropriate, but no one has complained in months).

Colors:
~ Nude shimmer holo: Sayuri – Anthos
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Pink pastel multichrome: POP Polish – Watermellon Bubbleslick
~ Silver holo: FUN Lacquer – 24 Karat Diamond
~ Stamp: BP – L084

For whatever reason, I just wanted to use one of the pastel slicks from POP Polish. It worked surprisingly well! Of course, Emily de Molly has made a surprisingly similar polish at this point so now I need to buy that and compare the two. I am getting off track, but so be it! Regardless, I hope you enjoyed it :-p

Medusa

This manicure was inspired by a stamping plate. I was sent plate Artist L005 to review from the Born Pretty store, and it is a weird plate! Typically Born Pretty lets me chose my own items to review, but this round they sent plates unprompted. And what they sent me was NOT my typical style! This plate has a lot of odd semi-people (bodies with plants as heads, tears, barbed wire…) honestly, very little that I would chose to wear and almost nothing that I think would be appropriate to wear to the hospital! And then I found Medusa.

I have been wanting to do a Medusa-inspired manicure for years. I adore Greek mythology, but faces are incredibly difficult! This face works beautifully. The plate is perfectly etched and every detail picked up nicely (I do wish I liked the patterns more!), making it quite easy to make an advanced stamping decal. The other snake patterns came from other plates, and honestly don’t pick up as well! Go figure.

Colors:
~ Green shimmer: Great Lakes – O R’lyeh?
~ Gold glitter: ILNP – Sparks May Fly
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Red: OPI – All I Want for Christmas (is OPI)
~ Nude: CND – Cashmere Wrap
~ Stamps: Born Pretty – Artist L005, Whats Up Nails – B025, Moyra – 32 Nature

I spent longer than I strictly needed to picking what base to use as the background for Medusa’s face. The green was an easy pick, I adore R’lyeh! If you want to challenge yourself to figure out what on earth to do with this stamping plate, you can find it for $3.99 here. Enjoy!

Lined Up Rainbow

Rainbow color time! I was in the process of re-creating one of my favorite manicures of all time (which will be posted separately later) and I decided to take photos at this stage before the whole thing was done.

In retrospect, the pink and red were too close to each other in color, and the dark pink was too dark! I have always liked blues and greens more than most other parts of the color spectrum, so I am a bit sad that my of my nails tend pink/orange/red! That said, it was still fun to do :-p

Colors:
~ Pink: Zoya – Kelsey
~ Red: Zoya – Sookie
~ Orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Green: Zoya – Josie
~ Teal: Zoya – Cecilia
~ Blue: Zoya – Ling
~ Indigo: Zoya – Danielle
~ Purple: Zoya – Landon
~ Dark pink: Zoya – Ciara

Hope you enjoyed ALL the colors! Stay tuned (at some point) or the completed manicure 🙂

Nude and White Splatter

This one is…interesting? I don’t honestly know where I was going with it, but I wanted rose-gold-on-nude and some splotches of white. I guess I achieved that? Regardless, it was somewhere between subtle and fun, which works! The stamps are from two different plates but they worked pretty well together.

Colors:
~ Nude shimmer: Picture Polish – Cherish
~ Rose gold: Essie – Penny Talk
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamps: EdM – 03, Lina – Make Your Mark 02

Short and sweet! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

Glimmering Leaves

Simple but so good! This, despite being a manicure that took maybe 30 minutes (color nails green, stamp with black, color in with shimmer multichrome) is one of my favorite looks in the near past. I don’t usually like things that are so minimal, but the colors work, the stamping was perfect, and it just came together really well!

It helps that I have a new pretty green creme to work with, Josie by Zoya. I have been using Josie a lot (partially because the polish has been sitting in my two-swatch section on my desk, and partially because it is a very pretty green). It is a true medium-tone green, just a hair brighter than neutral, and honestly doesn’t seem to lean blue or yellow. This is two coats. I love it 😀

I do a little regret adding the glittery polish over the top of the stamp rather than under. It means that in indirect light you can’t see the veins in the leaves, all you see are the glitters! But the glitters are so pretty that I mostly don’t care.

Colors:
~ Green creme: Zoya – Josie
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Pink shimmer: POP Polish – Watermelon Bubbleslick
~ Stamp: UC – Lovely Leaves 02

That’s all for today! Hope you all enjoyed :-D. Friday’s is slightly more involved but less elegant, if you can call something green elegant!

Wild Ripples

Super straightforward but still pretty! Mostly because putting awesome teal flakies over slightly darker teal-blue polish is a recipe for nail happiness 🙂

Unfortunately I broke a nail prior to painting these, so my free edge is curved. I briefly thought about cutting my nails shorter but flat…but to cut them flat would have been to make them VERY short and I didn’t relish that thought! So, here we are.

Colors:
~ Blue metallic: Zoya – Estelle
~ Silver: A England – Excalibur Renaissance
~ Teal flakies: Zoya – Masie
~ Stamp: Moyra – 32 Nature

That’s all for today! Hope you enjoyed 🙂 stay tuned for more nature-themed art on Wednesday!