I'm in space!

[Note: This was supposed to be posted ages ago. It did not post when I told it to. So it's being posted now. Sigh.]

This will be the last of the backlog of stuff I did before I started the blog. Which means the last of the poor-quality, non-clean nail photos! Yay!

After the success of my flowers, which I left on for almost a week, I got ambitious. I'd found another video on YouTube that I desperately wanted to try, and even though I didn't have all the colors they called for, I did it anyway.

Space. Trial. Puttin' the system on trial. In space. Space system. On trial. Guilty. Of being in space! Going to space jail!

The colors I used were black, dark blue, white, green, dark neon pink, translucent light pink and glitter. I didn't yet have yellow, which I think sadly means my nails were just that much less cool. I used the green instead, which worked pretty well, and dabbed a bit of the light pink on top since the overall result was very dark.

I'll be honest, I kind of struggled with this design, and I wasn't especially happy with how it turned out. The first struggle was that the nebulae came out incredibly opaque, even though I made a point to try to follow the video's instructions to keep it light and transparent. The second struggle was symmetry. I LOVE asymmetry and employ it a lot in my photography, but drawing asymmetrically is much harder to get used to. As a result, the nebulae on my nails were mostly symmetrical and solid, instead of cloudy and natural-looking.

The third struggle was the stars. I didn't own any toothpicks, or really anything that had such a narrow point at the end, so I had to use my tiny eyeliner brush. The problem with this is that brushes bend when pressure is applied to them. Even using the lightest of dabs, many of the stars ended up much too large and oblong.

I've gotta admit too, the narrator's voice for that video is a bit... spacey? (Yuk, yuk.) Sorry. The voice was kind of irritating, though.

BUT! That doesn't mean that this design wasn't a lot of fun, and didn't still look pretty dang cool when I was done. I may very well give this another try at some point, especially since I now have the tools to do it properly.

First Successful Nail Art

So much mediocrity! I'd painted a few pretty things, but nothing really unique and fun. Then, a few days into March, I found this video. Me: "I MUST TRY THIS." I've always loved abstract everything, and really, really enjoy taking abstract photography, so abstract work on my nails is just the logical next step.

Obviously, being painfully limited in color choice, I didn't have the colors called for in that video. But Sinful Colors' Merlot and Aqua are quite pretty together, so that's what I used, along with Sally Hansen's white and Sinful Colors' Black on Black.

In the future, when my creations and this blog actually start overlapping in time, I'll have pictures for each step of the process. For now, the video linked above has the steps, and this is my result:

SWIRLY

It's a bit busier than I would've liked, but for a first try at anything fancier than a swoosh with dots, I was pretty happy with it. I got a number of compliments from strangers on it, too!

EGO BOOST.

Next up: My first real, successful, actually-pretty-and-even-elegant nail design.

Taking a step back

The first attempt at being all fancy turned out kind of mediocre, so I backed off and started simplifying. For pretty much all of January, I wore only the UV topcoat that came with the French manicure kit.

There is something strange happening with the polish on my middle finger.

This let me practice painting, which went from clumsy to, well, not-quite-as-clumsy. It also strengthened and protected my already ridiculously strong, tough nails, and gave me something to admire until I felt comfortable trying something new again.

Meanwhile, I found YouTube nail art tutorials.

NAIL ART TUTORIALS!

And so many of these tutorials were just breathtaking. Simple to create, but so pretty.

I started slow, in large part because I had a grand total of five colors (including black and white) available to me, and the only tools I had were the brushes that came with the bottles and a tiny art brush that doubles for eyeliner. For the following images, the polishes used were: Sally Hansen French White, Sinful Colors Black on Black, Sinful Colors Aqua, and Wet 'n Wild Lavender Pearlescent (which is actually a dark pink, so the name makes no sense at all).

Also, I was obsessed with French tips. Color was irrelevant, so long as there were distinguishable tips. I've found that solid nails give the illusion that the nail is shorter than it is.

In order of experiment, three designs:

Credit for this design idea here.

Cleanest French tip done to date. One nail only? Art nouveau.

Cleaning up edges is optional.

This takes us up through the end of February. March begins going deeper into polish fascination with more (and better... ahem) designs.

Getting Started

So, the first 26 years of my life I had little to no interest in nail polish.

And then suddenly, friends that I spent lots of time with were ALL ABOUT NAIL POLISH. Talking about it almost daily, buying pretty polishes and sharing pictures of nail conquests. At the time, I owned precisely zero nail polishes.

Welp, turns out nail polish enthusiasm is contagious.

It also turns out that eBay has ridiculously cheap nail brush sets.

It also also turns out that Zoya 3 for 3 sales are hard to turn down.

Going to the store every Monday to buy my lunches for the week means walking down the cosmetics aisle... which means that I'm slowly stocking up on polish. My first polish purchase was when their fanciest polish was on sale, so I got four really pretty colors for about $10. I figured I also needed a topcoat, but the only option was a French manicure set of three.

Oh well! I can totally use the white and sheer pink too. And bonus sticky guides!

So, y'know what I did? I went home and made the most obnoxious nail art EVER.

I started with two coats of Merlot and then one coat of Pearl Harbor by Sinful Colors, which resulted in a sleek, classy red peppered with bumpy, greenish spots (not the fault of the polish - this was me being TERRIBLE at applying the stuff). Yet, this wasn't enough for the ambitious me of December 2011; there needed to be an actual design.

The Sally Hansen French manicure kit had come with something like 40 curved and 40 straight guides. Inspiration struck - I would make an elegant white swoosh with an elegance that elegance itself would bow down to. One swoosh per nail. Genius.

The number of guides was limited, so I figured that they must be used sparingly and repeatedly. So, for all the swooshes, on both hands, I used four guides. To create the swoosh I simply put the two guides at an angle to each other, and then painted within the gap, starting with the thumb and moving towards the pinkie.

Now, the thing about reusing guides is, nail polish dries and globs with each use, filling in the narrow end of the gap between them and generally making them much more likely to leak.

By the time I finished the pinkie nail, the swoosh was looking pretty ragged.

So I had gaudy red sparkly nails with a white swoosh on them.

Clearly not enough.

I NEEDED DOTS.

Three dots, diminishing in size, along the top of the swoosh. This was going to be epic.

And y'know, the dots didn't turn out too badly. A bit lopsided, but generally circular and smooth-ish.

Topcoat, and then wait for three hours for the thick slop of polish to dry and harden!

And, naturally, I didn't know how to/didn't want to bother with cleanup before snapping a cameraphone image of my creation to show off.

I didn't figure out the importance of cleanup until just a few weeks ago.

Here's the masterpiece:

I am amazing. Clearly.