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!

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!

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!

Bright Teal and Dark Roses

This was fun, and almost-but-not-quite perfect! Regardless of the imprecations (entirely my fault with color selection) I enjoyed wearing this! I also don’t know why I don’t actually have more floral manicures to post. What have I been painting if not flower?!

The design was inspired by @ponkle. In retrospect I wish I had used a brighter pink for the base of the roses! This ended up looking almost neon-with-goth because of the dark roses. I love it anyway. Of course, I also cheated. The dots are freehand and everything else is stamping 🙂

Colors:
~ Teal: Emily de Molly – Glee Ridden
~ 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
~ Stamps: BP – L020, MoYou London – Frenchy 14

Short and sweet today, but with pretty pictures of course! Hope you enjoyed!

Purple and Gold Tilt Marble

I don’t know the actual name for this technique, but I am going to call it tilt marbling. Water marbling uses water, dry marbling happens directly on your nail, and tilt marbling happens on an external surface by adding lots of polish and tilting the surface to get a cool pattern. In this case, I used a base of magnetic purple (inspired by Urban Nail Art, which was genius), then red creme, yellow creme, and gold sparkle polish, and tilted my stamper until my pattern was perfect. I would then try and re-center the blob of polish so one area wasn’t thicker than anything else.

Because I did this on the stamper, it was very easy to remove. Had I done this on my mat I imagine I would have needed to add top coat to thicken the decal before I could apply it, and I love my decals thin. Luckily, I have three largish stampers and was able to cover all 5 nails by just making the decals cover most of the stamper face and then cutting them in half.

Colors:
~ Purple magnetic: Nails Inc – Houses of Parliament
~ Red: Zoya – Sookie
~ Yellow: KBShimmer – Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana
~ Glitter: Zoya – Faye

In retrospect, I do wish I had used less gold glitter. I tried to cut it down by the time I reached my third stamper head, and even so it took over! I do love that I used (and then magnetized) the purple polish, you can see the magnet effect best at the tip of my middle finger, and it looks awesome. Next time I do this, I might use two magnetic polishes. We shall see! Hope you enjoyed!

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!

Safari Sunset

Scenery plates make awesome nail art surprisingly easy. All I had to do for this one was gradient, then stamp! The gradient, of course, took longer than anything else, and the result was very fun to wear! Once the gradient was done I actually painted over the whole thing with a yellow jelly polish to brighten the red and oranges, since the base polish was red (rather than white or yellow which are my go-to in a gradient like this).

The base color is a new-to-me red polish called Sookie by Zoya. This is three thin coats. The polish is very pretty and quite bright (I don’t know that neon red is a thing, but this is close), and covers well. It also, shockingly, removed very easily for a red! Most of my reds turn my cuticles red as the polish comes off, and this one played nicely.

I am actually really happy with how my yellow stamping polish gradiented, I wasn’t expecting to get much yellow tone over such a bright red!

Colors:
~ Red: Zoya – Sooki
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Yellow: Stamping polish
~ Yellow jelly: Soap Bubbles Yellow
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BM – XL204

That’s all for today, hope you enjoyed! My formal neurology residency starts today (as opposed to the medicine intern year I have been doing for the past 12 months) so my time is going to become even MORE limited. I will try to keep posting, but if the blog has some random blank days, I’m sorry! Blame work :-p

Orange Snake

This is a bit of an odd manicure. I wanted to show of my new thermal a polish, but I may have gone a little overboard? The design was cool, but the thermal polish is hardly the star of the show with so much else going on!

What you see here are three thin coats of POP Polish Leaves of Gold. This polish is overwhelmingly filled with flakies. Tons of flakies. Swimming in them. The polish color is a bright yellow (almost a green) when warm, which turns into a bright orange-red when cool. The flakies show up more distinctly in the yellow state but are obviously also very visible when orange. The color shift was easy, but not as dramatic as I expected despite the colors being quite different! For me, the polish mostly sat in a pale-orange state.

The design was made by stamping with the snake stamp, and then grabbing a red jelly polish and just coloring in part of the design. There is a part of me that wishes I had also added some gold, but that would have been even MORE distracting!

Colors:
~ Orange flakie thermal: POP Polish – Leaves of Gold
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black of Black
~ Red glitter: Zoya – Aphrodite
~ Stamp: Moyra – 32 Nature

Hope you enjoyed! I think this should be the last thermal post till Fall, there isn’t much color shifting happening in the summer!

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!!

Copperized Patterns

A post! Sorry its so late. Today was my day off and I still barely got everything done! Also the Blues won the Stanley Cup and now the whole city is honking and cheering. I suppose I should be posting blue nail art but I have nothing prepared at the moment! The stadium (well, both hockey and baseball) are about a mile from my house and there are helicopters circling overhead at the moment.

Anyway, this was a very fast manicure. Beautiful multichrome holo polish and a matching stamp. Ta-da! It helps that this stamp is both playful and elegant :-p

Colors:
~ Red-gold holo multichrome: Enchanted Polish – I Am the Walrus
~ Brown: Zoya – Louise
~ Stamp: EdM – 06

Hope you guys enjoy, despite the late-ness! I am already dreading my shift in the emergency room tomorrow morning, I assume it will be full of people who over-indulged following the hockey win!

Cracked Garnet

I couldn’t decide if this mani reminded me more of golden tree branches (which was the intention) or a broken gemstone (which is equally cool), so I went with gemstone! Either way, these nails ended up beautifully sparkly.

I seldom reach for my pure flakie top coats. Honestly, I feel like they overwhelm the color under them (which I suppose is the point) but I feel bad covering up my base color! In this case I used a purple I don’t like much, which made me feel overall better for the focus being on the flakies :-p

Colors:
~ Dark purple: Station – Happy Wine-y People
~ Orange glitter: Born Pretty – Raging Fire
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: BM – XL472

Happy Friday, and I hope you enjoyed! Its >90 degrees in St Louis right now, and absolutely miserable with humidity. I don’t understand this weather, it was in the 40s less than a week ago!

Risen on Wine

This manicure was SO straight-forward that…I kinda forgot to take photos of it. 80% of the photos that I have are oddly out of focus and 15% are badly framed. Oops! At least it is a simple one I suppose!

Colors:
~ Dark red: Confetti – Masquerade Ball
~ Red holo: A England – Rosebower
~ Stamp: EdM – 06

So…that’s all for today. Not much to say! Friday’s manicure is a bit more exciting I promise :-p

Golden Sheaves

This is another old one, I painted these back in the fall too! They were supposed to be wheat sheaves or something, but the look mostly floral-y and very sparkly. Honestly, I keep forgetting that I own this base polish and it is so darn stunning!

I have an intense love/hate relationship with glitters. On the one hand, they are beautiful, and most of them have this jelly depth that leaves me staring at my nails whenever I wear them. On the other hand, they are a pain to apply (since, lets be honest, you have to place a lot of the glitters, especially larger ones) and the are REALLY a pain to remove!

Eleven at least isn’t that hard to get on the nail, the glitters are well-dispersed, uniform in size, and smallish. But it costs so much time to take off!!

Colors:
~ Burgundy glitter: Illyrian – Eleven
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: Floral BP – X43

I think that’s it for today! I hope you enjoyed 😀

Pink and Red Tread

This features another of the Zoya polishes that I bought to replace an existing polish; in this case my favorite mid-tone pink is simply empty. I tried to use it on my thumb and couldn’t get enough out of the bottle (although I did end up using a tiny sample size pink that is almost identical for comparison) Unlike my pale pink adventure, this pink polish is not nearly as close in color, nor is it as easy to use!

On my pinky, middle, and pointer fingers I have 3 thick coats of Zoya Kitridge. As it is touted on the website as a “5” and thus totally opaque, this polish is a lot more jelly-like than it should be! It was also supposed to be a bright “barbie” pink, but I honestly think it is too pale for that. It is a pretty enough color, but not what I was looking for! I also have two thin coats of Bubbly by Revlon on my ring finger, and a weird mix on my thumb (one coat of Pink Forever by Sinful Colors before it finally dried up, and one coat of Pinkini by Clinique which is an almost identical color). Regardless, Kitridge is too pale!

Then I went wonky. I decided to make a pink-to-red gradient, but I used a bright red rather than a dark red, and Kitridge is not opaque enough to gradient over Bubbly! So my poor ring finger just does not match. I ended up doing a kind of fun stamp up the middle of the gradient, but honestly I should have picked different colors!

Colors:
~ Light pink: Zoya – Kitridge
~ Pink: Clinique – Pinkini
~ Bright pink: Revlon – Bubbly
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Dark red: Revlon – Valentine
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: BM – 206

So, overall, this manicure was a bit of a disaster. I blame Kitridge…I had a whole thing planned with a darker pink but it was not going to work with a medium-light pink! *sigh* I wish there were more comparisons on the internet, but at this point there are probably millions of shades and finishes of nail polish and that would be far too much to ask!

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.

Abstraction in Gold

This mani only worked because my nails are currently short enough that I could turn the stamp sideways and use different parts on each nail! I Initially wanted to do gold on some pastel background, but decided that dark red would look better. It totally does. I also almost got in trouble at the hospital for wearing nail art too visibly! Oops!

Regardless, this nail art was incredibly easy and surprisingly striking. It took a total of 30 minutes (and most of that was waiting for the red base to dry). Success!

Colors:
~ Red: Zoya – India
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: BM – XL204

That’s it for today! Simple stamps. Wednesday’s post is a lot more involved…stamping and gradients oh my!

Marching Copper Trees

To be fair, when I painted these (well, stamped them) it was a few weeks out from Christmas. I always thought this particular stamp looked rather like christmas trees if you only used half of it! Otherwise it looks like stylized stalactites and stalagmites.

Of course, any manicure using an awesome mutlichrome and a rose gold stamping polish is going to look pretty good. This was easy to make pretty!

Colors:
~ Red-gold multichrome: ILNP – Greatness
~ Rose gold: Essie – Penny Talk
~ Stamp: BM – XL158

Short, sweet, and straightforward! If it helps, the reason this post is so short is that I am taking Step 3 of the medical board exam tomorrow. And Friday. Because of course it is a two day test *grumble grumble* but after this Friday I am free again!

Candystripped

You guys, I am terrible! I am sorry it has been a week since my last post…I just didn’t have time to put together any of this since then! I was at my in-laws for Christmas and then my sister (and her adorable puppy) came to visit me, and there wasn’t time for photo editing! I am wearing the same design on my nails that I placed a week ago. A WEEK. And it is chipped and awful. Sorry nails!

Anyway, this design was supposed to be candy canes, and was intended to go up last Wednesday just after Christmas. I failed. But I am going to post it anyway!

The base color here is three thin coats of Aphrodite by Zoya, which is a pretty orange-leaning bright red with glitter, but unfortunately is not QUITE opaque. I will likely end up using this as a jelly rather than a glitter crelly due to the three coat problem! But I love how bright it is. I bought Aphrodite (and like 15 other polishes) during black friday/cyber monday deals.

Colors:
~ Red glitter: Zoya – Aphrodite
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: Born Pretty – Halloween L004

Sorry for the late post, and I hope you enjoyed anyway! Happy new years!!! (I swear I also had a real new years post but of course it isn’t edited yet. C’est la vie!)

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!