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!

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!

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?

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 🙂

Failure Fire

I tried to make an “easy” water marble by making only one marble…and taking it off the water. The resulting decal was so thin that it fragmented into pieces as soon as I tried to apply it! I ended up using it as a water decal (including dunking my nails in water so I could reposition the super thin layer of polish) and it was still a disaster. I don’t know how those other people do it…maybe they use more polish so it isn’t as thin? Regardless, this took much longer than a normal water marble although, the one shining point, the cleanup was easier :-p

Of course the end result after all that toil was also boring…so I added dots. I wish I had made the dots white or black in retrospect, the orange doesn’t add much!

Colors:
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Red: Zoya – Sookie

Despite this failure of a fire-themed mani I hope you got a little enjoyment. Stay tuned on Wednesday for something slightly less pathetic!

Abstract Rainbow Stripes

What to say about this manicure. It is weird. I don’t usually do a gradient from yellow…most gradients go over white! I also don’t usually alternate nails quite as markedly as this. However, since I wanted the whole thing to glow in the dark like crazy, I was stuck using Dayglow as a base which dictated how the rest of the manicure looked!

Dayglow is one of those polishes that I forget I own until I see someone else’s cool glow in the dark manicure. And then I decided that I absolutely need to do one. There was no particular inspiration for this manicure…I just wanted some combination of glow in the dark and rainbows! Honestly, I think it looks pretty cool if rather odd.

Colors:
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Glow-in-the-dark: Serum No 5: Dayglow
~ Red: Zoya – Sooki
~ Orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Green: Zoya – Josie
~ Blue: Zoya – Sia
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamps: Lina – Make Your Mark 02

That’s all for today! I feel like a bright rainbow is suitably summer-like for todays 100 degree and 99% humidity, but then again I wore this back in the winter *shrug*. Hope you enjoyed!

Cutting in with Holo

Happy birthday to me! And its been pretty incredible so far…my intern year is finally over which both means I get a full week off (wow) and that I don’t have to do internal medicine anymore! Yay! Also, a friend of mine took my last ED shift so I didn’t even have to work and overnight into my birthday! Win all around 😀

Of course, no birthday is complete without some awesome nail art! I am currently wearing rainbows (obviously) but I figured it was about time to post these ones! I was inspired by @urbannailart and just ran with it!

I ended up duplicating her idea, that is to say cutting triangles out of silver to make the design, but since she used foil and I just used polish they were MUCH harder to place. I kinda wish I had just freehanded them! Oy. Still came out pretty nicely but it took much longer than expected!

Colors:
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Purple: L’Oreal – Paparazzi Pleaser
~ Pink: Zoya – Kelsey
~ Orange: OPI – Freedom of Peach
~ Silver holo: Color Club – Harp on It

Hope you enjoyed! I am looking forward to doing some more neon/crazy designs at home while I have the time and freedom to be out of the hospital!

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!

Pagoda and Maple

I love this mani. The leaves are upside-down from where they should be (oops) but it still looks awesome. Also, I finally did a stamp transfer to make a mirror image! That has NEVER worked for me before!

The base polish here is a new-to-me beauty called Darling, Red Isn’t Your Color by Cadillaquer. It is an off-white jelly base filled with tiny red glitters and small and medium black glitters. It is subtle and amazing and I love it. I am always looking for more off-white crellies and this is a success! This is three thin coats.

I then stamped in black, colored the leaves in pale grey and the roof in two different shades of red (you can’t really see the gradient but it made me happy), and voila! Next time I do this (cause lets be honest, this combination of designs is happening again) I will make sure the maple leaves point DOWN not UP. Oops!

Colors:
~ White crelly: Cadillacquer – Darling, Red Isn’t Your Color
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Grey: Zoya – Dove
~ Red: OPI – All I Want for Christmas (is OPI)
~ Dark red: OPI – Visions of Love
~ Stamps: MoYou – Porcelain 01

That’s it for today! Happy Friday. It is currently only in the low 80s in St Louis…I hope this cooler weather holds until I have a few days off next week!!

Rainbow Gradient

Rainbow time! it has been a LONG time since I posted a rainbow (or painted a rainbow honestly). I need to do more rainbows!

So, anyway, this is a simple rainbow gradient. I went with fairly neon colors because…well, I felt like it. At some point I’ll need to do a pastel and dark rainbow with my newer wider selection of colors (again, it’s been a while).

Colors:
~ Bright pink: Zoya – Kelsey
~ Bright orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Neon green: Salon Perfect – Loopy Lime
~ Blue: Zoya – Ling
~ Purple: Zoya – Margo

That’s all I have for today! Hope you enjoyed, and happy weekend!

Pink Along the Circle

I have no idea. I just started playing with things and ended up here? I wanted grey, red, and pink, and somehow wound up turning to this pattern.

I started with a light grey base and layered one coat of a glitter polish overtop, to give it some flakies. I then stamped, and dotted the rest of the pattern. The only really fun part of this design is that I mixed red and white and just swirled them together, so the dot color is variegated.

Colors:
~ Light grey: Zoya – Dove
~ Grey glitter: Polished for Days – Grey Opal
~ Dark red: OPI – Visions of Love
~ White: LA Girl – White On
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BM – S101

That’s it for today! A bit of an odd design with a bit of an odd collection of colors, but overall not terrible :-p.

Golden Highlights

Kinda 1920s, yah? Honestly, if I had been thinking about it more I would have reversed the stamps, I like the idea of the spread fan shape coming from my free edge better, but too late! Also, my gold stamping polish has official run out and I will need more.

Honestly, I just wanted to play with 212 again, it is a subtle yet pretty polish, and one of the first I ever bought when I got into nail polish in 2012. My obsession with various types and finishes of polishes have varied over the years, and the dark vampy jellies with subtle shimmer and flakies (ok, I think in that particular family I really only own two polishes) don’t get worn very much at all! So here is some love, 212.

Colors:
~ Black with glitter: OPI – 212
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: MoYou – Steampunk 06

That’s it for today! Hope you enjoyed. Friday is…more stamping. I feel like I hardly have time to do freehand anymore, everything is stamps!

Love Above

This mani is a bit of nail art, some swatching, and a small amount of comparison. When Zoya did their New Years sale, I bought 4 new polishes that I intended to replace some terrible polishes that I own, and to fill a few gaps. This is the first of them!

What you see here are three thin coats of Jordan. I bought this polish to replaced Tickled Pink by Wet n’ Wild which takes 4 coats and is incredibly thick. I wanted to compare the two, so I put Tickled Pink on my ring finger, and Jordan on all the others. I cannot tell the difference! Which is to say that the swatches of Jordan online are accurate. I was hoping Jordan would be a two-coater, but for a pastel 3 isn’t terrible. This is just a nice pastel pink creme. No frills.

Colors:
~ Pastel pink: Zoya – Jordan
~ Pastel pink: Wet n’ Wild – Tickled pink (ring finger only)
~ Pink: Zoya – Ciara
~ Dark pink: OPI – Vision of Love
~ Dark pink holo: A England – Let Me In
~ Stamp: B Loves Plates (from the tiny heart next to the plate name)

I then added a gradient, and stamped a tiny pink heart near my cuticle. Super easy, but quite pretty! I do wish I had started the gradient a biiit close to my free edge, but it still looks nice! It was a really quite fitting manicure to wear right before Valentine’s day…so I hope you guys all have a great (and chocolate-filled) tomorrow!

Highly Contrasted

So, being honest, I don’t love this mani. I was a little pressed for time and wanted to both stamp something cool, and use the colors that the nail polish base was designed after. Since the polish is called You Look Like Seafood in honor of Tamatoa from Moana, that meant fuchsia and gold. And unfortunately, this is where I ended up!

This is three thin coats of You Look Like Seafood! by Dreamland polish. I love love  LOVE this nail polish…the blue base, the pink shimmer, the flakies, the whole thing is stunning. I also really only needed two coats, I added the third just for a bit more depth. That said, I hate the brush on the polish! There was no way NOT to flood my pinky as the brush was both wide and not curved. 😦

Colors:
~ Blue multi-glitter: Dreamland – You Look Like Seafood!
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Pink: OPI – Cute Little Vixen
~ Stamp: Moyra – 60 Cuts

This was also the first time I played with the Moyra Cuts plate, I have used it many times since but I was still working with how to stamp large swatches here! Luckily my polishes were quite opaque :-p. Hope you enjoyed this more than I did!

Red and Green Strokes

One day closer to gift-day (aka Christmas) and one more red/green manicure!

I started with red glitter, then double stamped with a white-to-green and green-to-white gradient (I don’t know why) and when that just looked messy I stamped with dark red. Despite the completely unplanned and frequently ugly nature of this manicure as it developed, I actually quite like the end result!

Colors:
~ Red glitter: KBShimmer – Ruby
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Dark red: OPI – Visions of Love
~ Stamps: Lina – Make Your Mark 02, BM – XL205

I think that is all for today. If you haven’t yet, please go vote for flightofwhimsy at the Nail Art Canada holiday contest! Hope you enjoyed!

Santa Claus is Coming to Town

This is my entry for this years nail art canada holiday challenge! I have entered for the past 5 or so years, and last year I won the internal competition! Most years I just pick my very favorite holiday mani that I had done up to that point…but this year I painted something specifically for the challenge. I have to say I am quite pleased! The design itself was based off a press-on nail set by Project Nails.

I started with a blue holographic base (mostly because I wanted to use a one-coat base and the halo hues collection from Color Club are basically magic). I then brush-gradiented using blue and purple scattered holo crellies and splotched on some dark teal jelly. Once that was all top coated and dry, it was design time!

I basically freehanded some rooftops, then a moon, then snow, and finally windows and sled. The hardest part of the whole thing was certainly the reindeer, I still don’t love them but without using acrylic I think this is the best I can do! The only part of this mani that isn’t free-handed is the stars: those are stamps. The top of the moon was made from playing with variations of white and yellow to make a little gradient.

Colors:
~ Blue holo: Color Club – Over the Moon
~ Blue scattered holo: Milani – Cyberspace
~ Purple scattered holo: Milani – Hi-Res
~ Teal jelly: Zoya – Frida
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Light orange: KBShimmer – Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana
~ Stamp: BM – XL213

Please go vote for this entry in the challenge, it would be amazing to win! You can find the link here and sprinkled throughout the rest of this post. I will keep posting the link for the remainder of the contest. Hope you enjoyed, and thank you for voting!!

Dotted Circles

This mani took a bit of work because of the double stamping! And also because working with sheer polish makes me nervous so it takes a lot longer to get anything done.

The steps to this one were basically sheer polish, stamp with gold dots, then stamp with rainbow dots. The exciting part was that I got a liquid metallic polish from Sally Hansen (back when mirror nails were all the rage) to stamp! It is such a perfect shiny gold but it usually dries to fast for stamping. Which goes to show that this plate is well etched. And since I was stamping in colors over it, I didn’t care if every part of the design was 100% filled in. I’ll have to play with it some more in the near future!

Colors:
~ Sheer nude: Sephora X – Marvelous
~ Gold: Sally Hansen – Liquid Gold
~ Blue: Zoya – Sia
~ Purple: Zoya – Landon
~ Pink: Zoya – Ciara
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Teal: OPI – Stay off the Lawn!!
~ Stamps: Moyra – 54 Matrix

That is a LOT of colors. Anyway, hope you enjoyed! Maybe I’ll actually have some seasonal nails up starting next week? I have a bunch of snowflake and dark color manis done, but I haven’t even put them on my computer much less edited them yet!

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!

Purple and Gold Galaxies

This mani tried so hard, but ultimately fell to the age-old adage: do not stamp over glitter with glitter (use a creme or a metallic). I started with a purple/gold multichrome but I was working too fast and my nails bubbled! So obviously I had to make a galaxy…but every time I tried to sponge on a new color I ended up hating it! I ended up just covering all the other sponged work with a dark purple glitter and some gold. Oh well!

As mentioned above, I also wish I hadn’t stamped with a glitter. Metallics just work much better. I was trying to make everything sparkly but the end result is that it is difficult to see the designs! I’ll need to re-use this stamp again soon, it is super cool.

Colors:
~ Purple/gold multichrome: ILNP – Masquerade
~ Grey with gold shimmer: Zoya – Yuna
~ Purple creme: Zoya – Margo
~ Purple glitter: Zoya – Valerie
~ Chunky gold glitter: OPI – All Sparkly and Gold
~ Gold glitter: Sally Hansen – Go for Gold
~ Stamp: BM – XL213

Every time I work with Valerie I wish I used it more, but I am always afraid to! Zoya keeps discontinuing their prettiest polish. Zoya: MORE GLITTERS! YOUR GLITTERS ARE GREAT! Anyway…hope you enjoyed! And let the moral be do not stamp with glitter over a glittery base!