Foiled... again

...and so much better too!

My colleague gave the Ciaté Foils set to me, because she felt like she doesn't have the patience for this kind of nail art. This is my first try with the set and I really like it. Next time, I want to try the glue with the foil I got from Bornprettystore. I haven't gotten that to work yet, but I suspect it's due to the glue. So maybe I get better results with the Ciaté glue.

Aside from playing with foils once more, I also tried practising the one stroke technique again. I'm still not all that happy with my acrylic paints. Either this or I'm doing something fundamentally wrong. :P

"And here's another manicure for the Nail Challenge Collaborative's month of July. I had pondered which manicure I should recreate and I decided on an old one where I first used foils. It's not even close to the one though. ;) The polish is the same: essence - Grand-Plié in Black. The rest is foils and acrylic paints."

The original manicure can be found -->here<--

The essence polish had almost gone bad, by the way. Even though I hadn't used the polish since that post from 2011 and the bottle neck was clean, I had to add a lot of thinner to be able to use it again. Good thing that thinner exists! :)

The Nail Challenge Collaborative - Pastels - Week 4

Hello!

On the last day of April, I want to show you the final manicure of this month's Challenge theme: pastels. Once more, I'm not sure if my colors are really pastel, but they're not bright either, so I guess it's fine. So for this last mani, I decided to tackle the One Stroke technique once more. My results so far have been rather mediocre, which I blamed on my acrylic paints for the most part. But maybe I was just too impatient and didn't practice enough... because I used the same paints this time too, and I think this time, it's a success. I watched a lot of youtube videos beforehand and praticed the brush movement on my palette. Should have done that earlier, huh.

So here's my newest installment of the one stroke... roses. Excuse the pic spam. I just really found it turned out pretty.

Of course, I noticed the stray hair too late...

For this mani, I once again used OPI My vampire is buff as the base. I'm still not convinced that I like this color on me, but as many others have written on their blogs, it's a great base for nail art. Except for the base and the topcoat, everything else is acrylic paint. I used an angled brush for the roses, a striper for details and a dotting tool for the dots.

Painting the roses turned out easier than I thought it would be. I didn't always manage at first, but you can just go over the whole thing and 'redo' it. I followed the brush movements like shown on the youtube videos and that worked fine. The brush movement for the leaves is still a enigma to me though. I tried. I really did. But I only manage half. For the 'downward' movement, I just can't figure out how to twist the brush. I need to pratice that.

All in all, this mani has a grandma-esque feeling to it, but why not once in a while. ^^ I took these pictures at dawn, when the sunlight was still soft. It added to the look, didn't it?
I enjoyed wearing this. I was constantly looking at the roses, still amazed by the smooth appearance and the details. What loading a brush with two colors at once can do, amazing. Hands down to all the ladies (and guys) who can really do this!

But it sure took some time to paint, so this won't be a technique for me to do on a regular basis, I think. And definitely no technique to just do on a whim. We'll see.

What do you think? Have you tried this technique?

Thanks for reading~

H+M - Blue

Hello everyone,

I hope you're all having a nice weekend. Mine is almost over, but before it is, I want to add one more nail art post to my little blog.

This mani wasn't planned at all. It just happened after I swatched the base color and found it so pretty that I decided to keep it on. I'll include some of the original swatch pictures at the end of this post.

The polish that I used as the base for this mani is from a mini-set by H&M and it has the awesome name "Blue". I'm always amazed by the creativity of H&M naming their mini-sets with names like that... The other polishes in this set were named "Pink", "Red" and "Black"... Anyway, it's a nice blue, somewhere between medium and dark blue. It's infused with silver shimmer and it reminds me a bit of a summer night sky. It's a bit sad that Blue is only a mini polish, I like it a lot!

After I had decided to keep wearing this polish for the time being, I wanted to add a little to that night sky feeling by adding some sparkles to it. What better polish could there be than Barielle Starry Sky? I hadn't used it before, but the glitter in this one was just as sparse as I hoped it would be. It's simple silver hexagon glitter in a transparent base, but  doesn't it look like stars on the blue?

I continued with a new attempt on the one stroke technique to paint the flowers. It worked okay, but this attempt made me realise that maybe my low quality acrylic paint is one reason for the gradient not being completely blended. I think I'm going to order a nice set of higher quality acrylic paints some time soon. I painted a couple of different flowers to practice different brush movements.

On ringfinger and pointer, I used two sizes of rhinestones to create curved lines. The silver rhinestones are 1mm, the aqua ones 1,5mm in diameter. I didn't topcoat them, because those rhinestones tend to get dull when I do. They stayed on longer than I thought they would. In the center of some flowers, I added a couple of matching bullion beads. Those were topcoated and actually didn't blead this time.

What do you think? Do you have any brand you can recommend me for my new acrylic paints?

And to finish this post, here are two pictures of H&M Blue all on its own!