Off season: Nightmare Before Christmas inspired nails

Today, I'm throwing in one of those manicures I did for the Halloween theme last fall: a Nightmare Before Halloween inspired one. I'm still not happy with my tutorial manicures and I'm starting to think that I should just redo them...

So, yeah, this is not the season for either Halloween or Christmas, but I have a friend who loves Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas and she can watch it and sing its songs all year long, so I'm just doing the same with this manicure. I wanted to do a Halloween Before Christmas manicure for about 3 years, but only 2013 I got around to do it. And I haven't even shown it to the aforementioned friend...

Aside from this, I'm choosing this manicure because it also fits the tutorial theme. I can't find the tutorial anymore and I can't even seem to remember the name for the technique, but well, it was inspired by a tutorial too. Maybe anyone knows which tutorial I'm talking about?

I remember that I was quite frustrated while painting the details on my ring finger. I just couldn't paint them fine enough. In the end, I ordered new brushes. ^^;

After one day of wear, I decided to mattify this manicure...

It looks more spooky this way, doesn't it?

Materials used:
- p2 eternal
- my go-to Color Club white
- essie matte about you
- white and black acrylic paint
- acetone

Basically, you paint your nails with your base color (black) and let it dry thoroughly. (You might want to apply one coat of topcoat here...) Then you apply random lines of your second color (white) and immediately dilute them with a fine brush dipped in acetone. You best do one nail at a time here. I managed to smudge my base a couple of times. Luckily, it doesn't show in the pictures.

What do you think about this manicure and the technique?

Thank you for reading!

Halloween-Mani #3 - mein Beitrag für HibbyAlohas Blog-Geburtstags-Gewinnspiel

Last but not least, today I want to show you my third Halloween manicure. In would actually do this one every other time of the year too (maybe not on Christmas XD), so I don't exactly feel like it's inapropriate to post this now, 3 days after halloween.

Once again, I'm going to dedicate this manicure to another blogger. German blogger HibbyAloha is having her first blogaversary and as a big fan of the US and halloween, she's combining her blogaversary giveaway with a halloween contest. As with Steph's Halloween Contest (which I won, btw~ yay~), I just love the idea and it was such an incentive to actually do another halloween themed manicure.

HibbyAlohas blogaversary giveaway is still open for her followers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It will close midnight November 6. Click -->here<-- to go to her giveaway-page.

With the following manicure, I'm going to enter for Set 2. I would really love to try Burt's Bees cuticle cream - and that's part of the set. :D

On to the manicure~
I have been thinking about doing a splatter manicure for a while now, and with the new Dexter season airing now, I knew that I had to do a bloody one for halloween. When I was thinking about what colors to use, I immediately knew that Illamasqua Load would finally be put to use. Finding a nice red in my stash was more difficult than I thought. For once, I don't own that many... some are jellys and that wasn't what I was looking for. And a lot of the rest were either too violet or just too sheer. In the end, p2 Fifth Avenue was my choice. (It actually really is a blood red. I had the chance to make sure of that when Mio scratched me again...)

 

Illamasqua Load on its own. My pictures aren't really color accurate though... they somehow are a bit too yellow. Load is a really really light yellow. Some still call it a white with a yellow hue, but I think this "hue" is a bit too strong to still call it a white. Excuse the missing clean up, but this was just step 1 of such a big mess, I didn't want to bother with it just now. :D

Doing this manicure was a lot of fun. I still have to work on my splatter technique, but since I planned to do some "smearing" as well, that wasn't an issue anyway. If I hadn't had to work the next day I would have left it just like that. The "bloody mess" looked so much like Halloween.

I somehow liked my right hand better... which is seldom the case. I'm right handed and my right hand usually ends up kinda wonky.

This is after clean up. This time, excuse the tip wear... these pictures were taken on day 3. I somehow thought I took pictures right after clean up...

I kinda love how my real wounds (thanks, Mio; thanks stupid window) match with the manicure... °-°;

What do you think!?

Halloween-Mani #2 - playing around with Zombie Zest

Okay, another late Halloween-Mani. I won China Glaze Zombie Zest in a giveaway this summer and had been waiting for fall/halloween so it would finally be an appropriate color. This is my very first China Glaze polish and I love the color!

I was a bit surprised though how sheer it was. And since it is my first China Glaze I was a bit greedy and decided that I need to layer Zombie Zest to preserve it ^^; I swatched it over every green and brown polish I own and finally decided to layer it over a metallic green polish from the drugstore brand basic. This is my second time wearing this green.

This is the basic polish on its own. It doesn't have a name or a number like most of basic's polishes. Annoying. It's a dark green metallic polish with slightly blue hue. It looks bluer in the picture than it really is. It's pretty streaky, but since I wanted to layer anyway, it didn't bother me much.

Two thin coats of Zombie Zest on top and it looks completely different. I needed two coats because the pretty glitter didn't spread completely evenly... which I didn't like.

The last picture was taken in daylight on a cloudy day. The pictures don't do the polish justice though. It seemed to have an inner glow somehow. Soooo pretty! I was staring at my nails a lot and because I liked it so much on its own, I didn't even add nailart until the very last day.

On the last day of wear, I was going through my nailart stuff and found out that I had a halloween themed stamping plate all along. Duh. I completely forgot about it. So right before taking this pretty green off my nails, I decided to play with the plate.

Hm. I even used my special white stamping polish by Konad, but on most nails the image didn't transfer well. A lot of the polish would still be on the stamper too, even if the image transfered properly. Maybe the plate's engraving is a little bit to "deep"? No idea. The spider from the same plate didn't transfer at all. In the end, I quickly painted some with the stamping polish and added some red rhinestones for contrast.


I wore this for like half a day. I still like Zombie Zest a lot better on its own, but I got to play around with a forgotten stamping plate, so it's okay. One thing I noticed again while looking through my photos of this mani... my camera really doesn't like greens. It failed before and this time once again! If my other camera weren't so bitchy with her batteries, I would use it more... :(

How do you like my Zombie Zest-layering? I yet have to wear Zombie Zest on its own... buuuut, so greeeeedy... can't waist it!!! ^^;

Halloween-Mani #1 - mein Beitrag für Stephs Contest

After one tiresome week being sick but working, I finally get around to post my first Halloween manicure. I'm very early with those, but whatever.

Not even thinking of Halloween, I bought this p2 polish from their new color range and really wanted to use it. I had been looking at all the amazing Halloween manicures other bloggers have been posting in the past weeks and decided that I wanted to do a classic orange and black manicure. As it turnes out, my new p2 polish notice me! was a very nice Halloween orange, so I got to use it! Yay!

This is nothing that hasn't been done before by someone else, but I think it's a classic design and I just totally love it. I painted my nails with p2 notice me! first, except my ringfinger. That one got painted with p2 eternal. I then painted the black motives using black acrylic paint, but I sponged the tree on my middle finger with p2 eternal. On my ringfinger, I painted a circle using white acrylic paint and then painted this with Zoya Tanzy. After it had dried, I continued with black acrylic paint for the house and the hill. For the orange details I used white acrylic paint again and then some more drops of Tanzy to make it glow. For the spider web on my thumb I first painted the spider web using white acrylic paint and then black acrylic paint on top. After a generous layer of top coat, this was done.

 I wore this for 5 days, but I have to admit that I basically had to touch up the tips almost every night. Even though I used a top coat that usually prevents tip wear for 2-3 days, it wouldn't keep the black acrylic paint from rubbing off. The orange nail polish underneath was perfectly fine still.

I have been thinking about doing a halloween manicure for a while, but it was Steph's Halloween contest that made me do it in the end! I actually like the idea of her contest. It's easy to just fill out a form to participate in a giveaway, but a contest is so much more fun! And hers is not even limited to nailart, so I'm really curious what the other girls did for her contest!

The Halloween contest over at Lacquer Passion is still open until November 2 - only for Germans though. Here's what you might win ;)

And since Steph wants to see what was used to create the contest entry, here's a picture of what I used. I forgot p2 eternal though...