Pink Marble

I think it's been established that I'm a fan of swirly nail art.  I just adore abstract, and the swirlier it is, the happier I am.  So when I was browsing YouTube yesterday looking for nail design inspiration and found a technique for mixing two colors for a marble swirl effect, I was ON IT.  I've always loved pink and black together, so I didn't even have to spend much time considering what colors to try.

LOL UR NAIL SHAPING

The process for making this design sounds harder than it actually was.  I started out by doing two coats of pink to get a solidly opaque base.  When that was dry, I painted black polish starting at about the 1/3 mark, then used a long, narrow nail brush to paint a smooth line between the transition from black to pink for a more professional look.  Using a tiny brush typically reserved for eyeliner, I put little dabs of pink and black together on the black section of nail, then quickly swirled them together before they dried.  Topcoat.

I was really worried after the first nail was finished, because it looked kind of weird.  But I was resolute - I was going to finish this!  The instant all the nails had the same swirls on them the effect became much stronger, and man, if it doesn't look awesome!

The biggest downside to this design is that the marble section of nail ends up with a thick slab of polish that takes a while to dry and is susceptible to smudging - and, surprisingly, chipping.  I created this design last night, and by morning the polish on one nail had already chipped.  I indignantly slapped a bit of black on there to keep it looking good, but it's been troubling me all day.  I fear that, despite how much I like the look of this design, I'll have to remove it sooner rather than later.  Phooey.

Belated Easter French Nail Design

A nail broke on my left hand. Right at the quick. So now, all my nails are short and slo-o-o-owly growing back out. Good thing French tips make the whole nail look longer, eh? (Compare the length in the photo below to this one. Yes, they're shorter. >.>)

Taking a picture of my right hand, using my left hand, with a right-handed camera. IT WAS NOT EASY.

This design... just kind of happened. I wasn't expecting anything Easter-like. I just picked up my purple, painted one nail, decided to do a different color - all nails ended up different colors, and then SILVER TIPS! The pinkie wasn't originally yellow though, it was a teal, but I changed it for better warm/cool balance.

There isn't anything special to how I created this, either. Just, one color for each nail, freehand silver tip, topcoat. Ta da!

Colors used: China Glaze Grape Juice, Sinful Colors Aqua, Wet 'n' Wild Lavender Pearlescent, Kiss Neon Yellow (sidenote: that stuff REEKS), Wet 'n' Wild Sage in the City, Zoya Trixie.

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.

Pink and Blue Flowers

Do you have a personal flower style? As in, if someone asks you to draw a flower, or if you were just doodling around, you kind of do the same thing over and over?

Well, I do. And when fiddling around with my nails after removing the abstract art that was just SO COOL, I ended up with those same flowers that I've muddled with since probably elementary school.

My flower style is very simple. Five petals, no stigma (the middle part where pollen and nectar are found), no stem, with little shoot-things between each petal.

The quality of this image makes Ansel Adams cry.

I used Sinful Colors' Merlot for the petals of all but the ring finger, and Wet 'n' Wild's Lavender Pearlescent for the shoots (if anyone has a better name for these, I'm all ears!). For the ring finger, I used Sinful Colors' Aqua for the petals and Wet 'n' Wild's Blue Moon for the shoots.

That tiny paintbrush (the only actual tool I owned at the time) did a great job. I created the petals by starting at the center and gently flicking the brush outward in a V shape, then filling it in. Once the petals were dry, I added the shoots, which were a simple, single-motion line. I painted two flowers on each nail except the pinkie because it's so small, waited for it to dry, then added a topcoat.

At this point, my ambidexterity was already improving - my right hand was almost as pretty as the left! Though, it did take a lot more time and effort. I think this is the first design I created that got questions about whether I'd had them done professionally, too.

This is also a very versatile design. It can be done with any combination of colors, and any size flower.

I think I'm going to have to do this design again, at the very least so that I can take high quality photos instead of that sadface cameraphone picture!

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.