Spring ASBMF Challenge #5: A Rainbow After the Rain

I was just thinking yesterday about how long my nails were starting to get.  Then I woke up this morning to find a chunk of the nail on my right middle finger missing.  I have no idea how it happened.  I didn't have any cracks or weak spots on that nail.  But there it was staring back at me, the whole corner missing, snapped off cleanly like someone had taken a clipper to it while I was sleeping.  So everything has been trimmed back, which I guess is ok in the long run.  I had a few nails that were taking a path of their own, so trimming them back has made them look straight again.  Then it was time to work on the next part of the ASBMF Challenge and tackle a rainbow design.  After a lot of thought, I decided to do scotch tape rays, à la Chloe's Nails.  I've done scotch tape manicures before but this was the first time I did small rays versus big sections, which would be more like color blocking.

I started out by free handing a rainbow with vertical stripes on my thumbs and middle fingers.

For the rainbow, I used China Glaze Poinsettia (red), Orly Crush On You (orange), Orly Lemonade (yellow), OPI Don't Mess With OPI (green), OPI Ogre-The-Top Blue (blue) and OPI Funky Dunkey (violet/purple).  I didn't really have any polishes that would work well for indigo so I made one on a paper plate by mixing two drops of Ogre-The-Top Blue, one drop of Funky Dunkey and one drop of Wet n Wild Black Creme.  I put a coat of Seche Vite over the rainbows so they would dry faster and I wouldn't have to wait as long to apply the scotch tape.  On the rest of my nails, I used two coats of China Glaze Liquid Leather.  Next I took 4 thin cut strips of scotch tape, which I cut at an angle so one end was skinnier than the other, and applied them to the rainbow nails.

The Scotch brand tape I used has silver and gold stars and squiggle designs on it, so that's the gold and silver blotches you see on the strips above.  Once I had the tape strips on and secure, I went over them with a thicker coat of China Glaze Liquid Leather and then immediately pulled off the strips with tweezers.

I think my right thumb actually came out the best.  I had the thinnest strips of tape on my thumb and they were angled better than on my other nails.  But overall I think the final design came out ok.  Not exactly as I had pictured it in my head but close enough that I'm satisfied with it.

Here's a look at what's up next...

And as usual, be sure to check out the other ladies participating in this challenge, either by heading over to the Facebook page for the challenge or by checking out the bloggers below:

Hannah from Polished Prisms

Amanda from Mandy's Polish

Heidi from DIY Polish & More

Katee from A Girl and Her Polish

Charlotte from Charlotte's Nails

Tess from Football and Fingernails

Karine from Karinea0a

Victoria from Manicurator

Sharon from What Color is My Coat?

Ashley from One Nail To Another

Dani from Rustic Comfort

Sue from Creative Design by Sue

Amanda from Counting Down to Bliss

Kayono from Neues vom Kellerkind

April from Munia's Nails

Sharra from The Blahg

Jess from Nearly Natural Nails

CR from Color Me Silly

T from Mami Blogs

Alyson from Beads. Nails. Food.

Spring ASBMF Challenge #4: April Showers

Back on Sunday, when I posted pictures of my glitter sandwich mattified, one of the things I mentioned was that I finally got around to doing the April Showers part of the April Showers Bring May Flowers Challenge.  Well, it's now 4 days later and I finally got a chance to edit the pictures and put this post together.  I wish I could say that I've been really busy with all sorts of important stuff, but the truth is that I just play way too many games on Facebook!  One of the reasons that I had such a hard time with this part of the challenge was that I had just recently done an April Showers themed manicure back in March.  I originally posted it about it here.  So I was kinda stumped trying to think of something that wasn't too similar to what I had already done.  When I was trying to come up with a design, I started to think about how my absolute favorite thing about rain showers is laying in bed late at night, with the window cracked open just a bit, listening to the rain hit off the blacktop on the street outside.

China Glaze Stone Cold is one of my recent buys that I had yet to try and I thought it would be perfect for representing a paved street.  The gritty matte finish would be perfect to act as blacktop and once top coat was added, I thought it might give the impression of a wet, rain-soaked road. 

I also wanted to do something different for the raindrops than what I had previously done.  That was when I remembered I had bought a set of rhinestone wheels from Bundle Monster back in January and had yet to use any of them.  Looking through the wheels, I came across these blue raindrop/teardrop shaped rhinestones that looked perfect for what I had in mind.  I had a feeling that having these rhinestones on all of my nails would probably drive me nuts pretty quickly, so I settled on just using them for accent nails.  And I decided to reuse the clouds idea from my previous April Showers manicure, but with a bit of a twist.  Rather than having bright white clouds, I had an image in my head of darker, grey storm clouds staggered with white clouds overlapping them.  My only problem was that I didn't have a very good grey polish for stamping.  I couldn't get any greys to show up well over the black polish.  So I decided to reverse my original idea and stamp white clouds first, then overlay grey clouds, so that part of the white clouds would remain intact and other parts would look darker and more stormy.

The clouds design is from Konad plate m79.  For the white clouds, I used Konad Special Polish in white and I used China Glaze Recycle for the grey clouds.  I used one coat of Seche Vite on all the nails with the clouds and two coats on the nails with the rhinestones.  I ended up only wearing this for a few days.  I put it together Sunday night, took pictures Monday and by Tuesday night I was taking it off.  That's not to say that I didn't like it.  But it was the first time I had ever worn rhinestones of any type on my nails and I was not used to my nails feeling bumpy like that.  I kept having the urge to pick at those little buggers and knock them off my nails!  I will just have to be try to get used to having bumpy nails once in a while, especially since I have so many more types of rhinestones in the Bundle Monster set that I want to try some day.  I will say that I was surprised how well they stayed on.  I just used top coat to put them in place and then, as I mentioned, used two coats of Seche Vite over them.  That seemed to be enough top coat to get rid of any edges on the rhinestones that might have gotten caught on something and gotten them ripped off my nails.

Next up...A Rainbow After the Rain.

Be sure to check out some of the other ladies participating in this challenge.

Hannah from Polished Prisms

Amanda from Mandy's Polish

Heidi from DIY Polish & More

Katee from A Girl and Her Polish

Charlotte from Charlotte's Nails

Tess from Football and Fingernails

Karine from Karinea0a

Victoria from Manicurator

Sharon from What Color is My Coat?

Ashley from One Nail To Another

Dani from Rustic Comfort

Sue from Creative Design by Sue

Amanda from Counting Down to Bliss

Kayono from Neues vom Kellerkind

April from Munia's Nails

Sharra from The Blahg

Jess from Nearly Natural Nails

CR from Color Me Silly

T from Mami Blogs

Alyson from Beads. Nails. Food.

Spring ASBMF Challenge #2: Ladybugs!

I have a short post today for my second installment of the Spring Challenge April Showers Bring May Flowers.  Challenge #2 is ladybugs and I immediately thought of a ladybug design that is on one of my Bundle Monster stamping plates, plate BM13.

Even though I knew I wanted to use this plate, it took me a little while to figure out exactly how to use it.  I did actually paint my nails with a medium gray to start but then when I stamped the first ladybug, the gray was just too dark so I scrapped that idea.  I decided to stamp multiple ladybugs over Orly Au Champagne instead, but only as an accent so I applied 3 coats of Au Champagne to my thumbs and ring fingers.  I spent the next 5 minutes marveling over Au Champagne's satin matte finish!  Somehow, in all the reviews of the Orly Holiday Soiree collection this past winter, I had completely missed the fact that Au Champagne was a matte.  I must have read it, but it somehow just never registered in my brain.  I was so not expecting the beautiful satin matte finish it has and now I'm so glad that I bought this back when I saw it moved to the clearance table at Sally Beauty.  I had only used it once before and that was just as a base on a nail wheel for swatching Lynnderella Snow Angel.  I must have been so excited about getting my Lynnderella order that I was apparently oblivious to the finish of Au Champagne when it dried.  Anyway...for the ladybugs, I applied a small amount of Konad Special Polish in red to the body of the ladybug design and a small amount of Konad Special Polish in black to the ladybug's head, then scraped and stamped.

I did that about 3 or 4 times per nail and just placed them in random directions on different parts of each nail.  I took a small dotting tool and Wet n Wild Black Creme to fill in the dots of the ladybug design when Au Champagne showed through.  On the rest of my nails I used 2 coats of Zoya Sooki and with the largest dotting tool and Wet n Wild Black Creme again, I placed random dots over Sooki to give it a ladybug motif.

I do really like this, but I'm not a huge ladybug fan, so I'll most likely be moving on to the next challenge within a day or two.  Although I was happily surprised at the reactions I got at work today with this design.  There were a lot of "Oh my God, are those ladybugs on your nails?!"  It really got a lot more attention than I expected!  One of the cool things about doing a challenge like this is that if I wasn't doing this challenge, I probably would have never done this design.  But because of the challenge I was able to experiment and work with themes I probably wouldn't have thought to do on my own.

Be sure to keep an eye on Hannah's blog over at Polished Prisms.  She'll be updating her posts with links to all the wonderful ladies also participating in this challenge.  So check it out!

April Showers Bring May Flowers

Ok, so yes, it is technically still March.  But this Tuesday does mark the official beginning of Spring and also, this post is serving as my entry into Enamel Girl's Nail Art Stamping Contest, which ends this Wednesday.  The theme of the contest is "Anything Spring" and when I think of Spring, I think of cooling afternoon rain showers and fresh flowers starting to pop up all over.

I decided to use Sinful Colors Cinderella as my base.  I just received it in the mail Friday.  I couldn't find it anywhere around me so I ended up buying it, along with Sinful Colors Green Ocean, from Traci's blog sale over at The Trace Face Philes.  Cinderella is very, very sheer though, so I decided to layer it over Revlon Blue Lagoon.  I originally bought Blue Lagoon to possibly layer Revlon Whimsical over, but it turned out to look almost exactly like the same shade of blue as Sinful Colors Cinderella.  The big difference is that Blue Lagoon has a silver shimmer and Cinderella has that awesome pinkish-copper shimmer that is making everyone go nuts over, myself included.

Revlon Blue Lagoon is a bit on the sheer side as well, but no where near as sheer as Cinderella.  It builds up very nicely after just two coats, whereas Cinderella would take 4 coats at least to be just as opaque.  So my base ended up being two coats of Revlon Blue Lagoon topped with one coat of Sinful Colors Cinderella.

Then I broke out my Konad Special Polish in white and a bunch of pastel Konad Special Polishes for the designs.

Using Konad Special Polish in white, I stamped the clouds design from Konad plate m79 onto my index and middle fingers and my pinkies.

Then on my thumbs and ring fingers, I stamped a flower pattern from Bundle Monster BM-224.

To get flowers of different colors, I placed drops from Konad Special Polishes in pastel violet, yellow, pastel green and pastel pink onto different parts of the flower pattern, then scraped and stamped on the flowers.

Taking my dotting tools, I then used the same Konad colors to dot the centers of all the flowers with a color different than the petals.  I waited for that to set up and then put a coat of Seche Vite top coat on the flowers and let that dry.  This way I didn't have to worry about bumping and messing up any of the flowers while I was trying to add raindrops with China Glaze Blue Year's Eve to my other nails.  To make the raindrops, I used the smallest dotting tool available and once I placed the dot of Blue Year's Eve on my nail, instead just lifting the dotting tool straight up, I gave the dotting tool a small, quick flick upward to stretch the dot into the raindrop shape.  Once the raindrops dried, I added a coat of Seche Vite to those nails to finish everything off.

This is my first time entering a nail art contest online.  There have been other contests that I've thought about entering but ended up procrastinating and just never tried.  So I was very happy with myself that I followed through on this one and making this design was a lot of fun!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Even though it turned out that my favorite St. Patrick's Day themed manicure was the plaid shamrocks I wore last week, I still made sure to rock some green all this past week up until today for St. Patrick's Day.  I have to say though, I just wasn't up for elaborate designs.  Am I the only one who was hit hard by the time change last weekend?  It never bothered me in the past, but this year it just threw me completely off and I was just tired and lifeless all week long.  I hope that's over with now and I'll get back on track this weekend.

For the first few days of the week, I had on a striped manicure using three different shades of green.  I started with three coats of China Glaze Gaga For Green.   I probably could have stopped at two coats, but there were a few thin spots on a couple of nails where Gaga For Green was going to be showing, so I went for a third coat to even it out.

Once that was done and dried completely, I scotch taped my nails and put on a thick coat of Zoya Shawn.  When Shawn was dry, I repeated the scotch tape closer to the tips and put on a thick coat of China Glaze Holly-Day.

I wish it had looked as nice in real life as it does in the picture.  In the picture, you can easily spot the difference between Zoya Shawn and China Glaze Holly-Day, but in real life you couldn't tell them apart in most light and so it looked like a weird two-tone off center pattern.  It wasn't horrible like that, but it bugged me so I ending up wearing it like this only on Monday and then Monday night I took Zoya Goldie and attempted (key word: attempted) to freehand some straight lines to separate the three greens.

That just made it worse!  If I could have done super thin lines, I think it would have worked better or if I had some thin gold nail art striping tape, that would have been perfect for this.  This only lasted another day and then I put myself out of my misery with an Irish flag design with a twist.  I started with three coats of Wet n Wild White Creme.  Then using China Glaze Four Leaf Clover and Orly Crush On You, I made the horizontal stripes.  I wore that plain for one day before deciding to take my red Konad Special Polish and Bundle Monster plate BM02 and stamp the lips design on as an accent on my ring and thumbnails, as a take on "Kiss Me, I'm Irish."