TNCC - Inspired by a Tutorial #1 - Butterfly Nails

Hi everyone,

today, I want to show you my very first butterfly nails! There was a time when a lot of people would do them all the time in the blogosphere. Even some stamping plates with the image turned up! I always found them really pretty, but same as the Galaxy Nails, something kept me from trying them. So when the prompt for January was released, this was one of my first ideas.

I don't have a link to a specific tutorial, but I think we have seen them often enough and there are a couple of tutorials floating around, so if you wanted to try, you can easily find them using a search engine. They're fairly easy to do even without the stamp.

Materials used:
- Zoya Crystal
- Nubar 2010
- Color Club Sparkle and Soar
- black acrylic paint

I used black acrylic paint for the wing shapes, but I originally wanted to use my black striper polish. I couldn't find it due to my stash reorganization I did after Christmas. I think the black polish would have been easier. More opaque, less tipwear after a day at work. Because even topcoat can't help a lot with that.

The color combination I chose was nothing original. I didn't save the pic back then, but 2012(?) someone else chose a blue base with a flakie topper to do butterfly nails and I found it so pretty, it burned into my mind ;) I kept looking at my nails all day...

But something magical is gone now... hm.

What do you think?
And one more question to those who read: I actually did most of my TNCC manicures for the fall themes but didn't post them. Would you find it weird for me to post Halloween inspired nail art now!? ^^;

TNCC - Inspired by Art - #4

Hello!

Today, I have my final art inspired manicure to show you.

This one is a bit different from the other manis I've done so far. Instead of an actual painting, I used a doodle I saved to my inspiration folder quite some time ago. It's a doodle by Laynie from LaynieFingers. She's suffering from fibromyalgia, a disease characterized by chronic pain in the muscles and connected tissue. Back in 2012, when things were quite bad apparently, she posted a lot of doodles instead of nail art. Doodling was a way of pain management for her. I find those doodles just as inspiring as regular nail art though. I can somewhat relate to what Laynie's going through, because my mom suffers from fibromyalgia too. Luckily, her's isn't as bad. Going through my inspiration folder I stumbled upon those doodles and decided to turn one of them into the inspiration for my fourth art inspired manicure.

You can find Laynie's original doodle here.

First of all, I sponged a yellow to white gradient onto my nails. The white part looked way to harsh without any further nail art, so I covered more and more with yellow to make it more soft looking - but with the black doodle on top, I can barely tell I used any white... Meh. No idea what polishes I used for this part! I'm guessing my go-to Color Club white, and unnamed yellow from beauty uk and OPI The IT-Color.

For the doodle, I used the black nail art pen from Born Pretty Store. It's my first time using it and I think it's okay. I wish the tip was a little finer. It smudges easily though and of course, I managed to smudge it while applying topcoat.

I didn't even notice that I did two consecutive manicures involving a lot of yellow until I sorted my pictures. And I don't even use yellow a lot... Something my unconscious mind wants to tell me!?

My final verdict: doodling is a lot harder than it seems!
And, thanks for reading, of course! ^^

TNCC - Inspired by Art - #3

Hi everyone,

so exactly one month ago my last post went online and I really thought I would be back to a more regular posting routine... but far from it! The same day we got bad news concerning my father's health and my thoughts obviously weren't centered around nail polish for a while. The week after, I got into an accident and was hurting badly for a while afterwards. Nothing serious happened, but with constant headache, I didn't feel like adding polish fumes to it. So I resorted to buying lots of polish instead. My pile of untrieds isn't high enough yet! ^^;

To find a way back into a more regular schedule, I'm going to start with the third installment of my art inspired manicures. Inspired by Art was the monthly theme of December for the Nail Challenge Collaborative in case you don't know/forgot.

Inspiration for this manicure is the painting "Hygeia" by Gustav Klimt.

Materials used:
- essence Tip Painter in Natural White (poured into a normal polish bottle)
- yellow and red acrylic paint

I tried my new acrylic paints for this mani, but I'm a bit disappointed in them. I bought them because they're supposed to be really opaque, but even without diluting them they're hardly as opaque as the ones I used before.

Thanks for reading!