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.

OPI Nicki Minaj Collection: Pink Friday & Metallic 4 Life

The haul post is coming, I swear.  It's actually about 99.9% typed up and saved as a draft.  I just haven't had a chance to take pictures of all the bottles yet.  In the meantime, this is my current manicure, which I did this past weekend.

I have no idea what to call this!  It's another one of those manicures that was not planned out at all.  I was more or less stumped for ideas.  I was thinking of some polishes I had, that I had yet to try, and something kept bringing me back to OPI Pink Friday from the Nicki Minaj Collection.  I have the whole Nicki Minaj Collection, but so far I've only used the Super Bass Shatter.  So Saturday night, I started with 3 coats of Pink Friday.

I was thinking that I'd like to combine Pink Friday with another untried OPI Nicki Minaj polish, Metallic 4 Life, but I wasn't sure how.  It was late, so I went to bed and waited till Sunday to decide what to do next.  I settled on using scotch tape to add Metallic 4 Life to just a third of each nail, diagonally.  The black base in Metallic 4 Life is not sheer but it's not 100% opaque either, so I decided to put down a coat of Wet n Wild Black Creme first.

After I removed the scotch tape and the black dried, I went in with Metallic 4 Life and just freehanded 2 coats of it over the black areas.  Then I wanted to fill in the empty pink space just a bit, so I stamped the center design from Bundle Monster plate BM07, using Konad Special Polish in black.

A coat of Seche Vite on top, once the stamping was dry, and I was good to go.

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."

Hearts-A-Plenty

This past week, I've been wearing a pink manicure with red hearts as my first Valentine design of 2012.  It was more or less done on the fly.  I had a Valentine idea I wanted to do but I wanted to save it for Valentine's Day itself, which left me feeling unsure of what I should to do for the week before Valentine's Day.  So it kind of evolved as I was painting my nails, without a real clear picture in my mind of what I would end up with.

Since I planned to focus on red for the week of Valentine's Day, I decided to go with a bunch of pink shades for the week before.  I started with a few coats of OPI Mod About You.  Then I taped off part of my nails at an angle and used a coat of OPI Sparrow Me the Drama, taped them off again and made a third stripe with Milani Digital.  Even though I read a ton of blogs, I'm not used to doing my nails with the intent of posting it online, so I completely forgot to consider taking pictures of my striped nails prior to stamping.  I'll have to remember from now on to take pictures in between steps.

While everything was drying, I sifted through my stamping plates trying to decide what I was going to use on top.  I finally settled on a tiled hearts pattern from Red Angel plate 114 and used Konad Special Polish in red.  I just recently bought the Red Angel plates off of Amazon after seeing them on Enamel Girl's blog, so I was looking for a chance to use them again.  It wasn't my best attempt at stamping though.  I usually don't have issues with the full nail patterns but this time I think that I end up pushing too hard when I was rolling the stamper.  I didn't even realize there was a pretty badly blurred spot, right on the tip of my left hand middle finger, until I was browsing through my pictures.  I also think that this design ending up looking better from a distance rather than close up.

Overall though, I was pretty happy with the way it turned out.  I'll be working my my next Valentine manicure this weekend, so I hope to have that up sometime during the week.  I also received my February Birchbox a few days ago, so I might take some pictures of what samples I received this month and do a post on that sometime this week as well.