Pastel Check

Hi everyone!

With this post, I'd like to show you some incredibly simple yet eyecatching nail art. I stumbled upon the idea on a >Korean blog< I'm following. The idea is creating a checkered pattern by layering sheer polishes. The original post uses an actual nail art kit including three sheer polishes in pink, blue and yellow and I decided to go through my stash and look for similar colors.

I decided to use
- essie French Affair (pink)
- Rival de Loop 481l (yellow)
- BeYu 142 (blue)

My polishes are far from being as sheer as the Korean ones, but they're sheer enough and worked quite well.

So what you have to do for this mani is really simple. You just apply stripes of each color next to each other until you reach your desired grade of opacity. You don't have to be very accurate painting those stripes. When that's dry, you take the same colors again and paint one more layer of stripes in a 90 degrees angle. Layering the sheer polishes over another creates new colors such as orange or green. Just like the original post, I took a white striper and added some lines. Mine turned out a bit thick though. One thick layer of essence BTGN Top Sealer sealed off my mani and made my white stripes even thicker. But also very shiny~

I got quite a lot of comments on this one and when I explained how easy it was, they wouldn't believe it. But it really was easy. The most annoying thing about this mani was the clean-up, because I didn't paint very neatly. This mani was quickly done, fun to do and the result is great. Nice idea! I like it!

I think this could look very nice with other sheer polishes too, layered over white or something. Maybe that's a way I can use my sheer nudes. Or a sheer white, sheer blue, sheer green for some wintery nails. I might have to try that soon...

What do you think about this idea?

Spring Challenge 11: Eggs and Chicks

Sunday, finally. I was soooo looking forward to the weekend! I haven't worked the early shift in a while... I was just so tired when I got off work yesterday. It had a good thing too, though. I had a lot more time on hand to paint my nails, haha.

So today, I want to present my quite uninspired take on the 11th theme of the Spring Challenge, which is Eggs and Chicks. I didn't want to do some cracked eggs and chicks like the ones showing up every year around Easter. But I didn't really have another idea too. I had been thinking about changing the base color to one of the crazy shell colors to be found in my mother's garden. She keeps a few chicken and some of them lay eggs in really interesting colors, e.g. chocolate brown or light green.

But when the time came that I decided to sit down and finally do my Eggs and Chicks mani, I had a light yellow polish on my nails already and decided to go with a classic color scheme.

So my base is Rival de Loop 481, a light yellow creme. I don't have the best experiences with Rival de Loop polishes, so I don't own many. This is actually my third. They are quite inexpensive, but what use is the price if you don't fancy the concistency and/or brush. When I swatched it first, it looked quite opaque, but in the end... 3 to 4 coats on my nails. Boo.

Well, for my manicure, I ripped apart one of those kitchen sponges with the black scratchy side and used that scratchy part to sponge Illamasqua Load and Essie Marshmallow on to my "old" manicure. Aside from the polish, there was some residue from the sponge too, but I liked the effect.

Using black acrylic paint I painted my little chicks and flower pot. They were inspired by a font I stumbled upon the other day. The lady created a few other cute fonts... sadly no free ones, it seems.

What do you think? Did you take a look at the font? :D