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 - #2

Hi everyone! 

Today, I want to show you the second art inspired manicure I did for the Nail Challenge Collaborative. 

Heute habe ich meine zweite kunstinspirierte Mani für euch! Meine Inspiration habe ich wieder auf Pinterest gefunden. Das Bild heißt "Before Morning" und wurde von Leonid Afremov gemalt. Die leuchtenden Farben auf dem dunklen Hintergrund gefallen mir wirklich sehr gut. Außerdem dachte ich, dass die verwendete Technik sich auf den Nägeln leicht nachmachen lässt. (Naja...)

I have also found my inspiration on pinterest for this one. The original work is "Before Morning" by Leonid Afremov. I love the bright colors on the dark background. Also, I thought that the way it has been painted should make it rather easy to recreate. ^^;

The accent nail was painted using acrylic paints on top of black polish. It's just easier for the details. The rest of the nails were painted with polish only.

Alles bis auf den Akzentnagel ist vollständig mit Nagellack gemalt, während der Akzentnagel fast gänzlich mit Acrylfarbe gemalt wurde. Ist einfach einfacher für die Details und leichte Farbabstufungen.

Products used:

- p2 eternal (black base)

- OPI Jade is the new Black

- Nicole by OPI Daffy Dill

- Kiko 356, 386, 389

- Catrice Nautica

- essence berry me home

- beauty uk nameless yellow polish

- acrylic paint

In general, I think this turned out ok. Sadly, the colors don't pop as much as I had hoped. I didn't want to layer too much, because I think that would have destroyed the effect somewhat. Some of the colors were actually more opaque before topcoat. The yellow for example. 

Mein Ergebnis finde ich soweit ok. Leider sind die Farben nicht so schön bunt wie beim Original. Ich hatte die Befürchtung, dass Schichten dem Ganzen abträglich wäre und habe deswegen jeweils nur eine Schicht draufgekleckst. Seltsamerweise waren auch alle Lackfarben vor dem Topcoat deutlich leuchtender als danach. Ganz stark z.B. beim Gelb.

What do you think?

Was meint ihr?

Let it Snow! Challenge 12: Winter Wonderland

Hi everyone,

I'm still catching up with the Let it Snow! Challenge, so here is my take on the theme for week 12: Winter Wonderland. By the time I finally did this theme, I didn't really feel like winter wonderland anymore even though it was still snowing here.

I ended up compromising between winter and spring somehow.

This is about 4 or 5 coats of Orly Winter Wonderland. It's a sheer polish and probably not really meant to be worn on its own, but I really wanted to wear it solo at least once. Also, since it's called Winter Wonderland, it was the perfect polish for this theme, isn't it?

At the tips, I added random dots in light and dark purple (essence), as well as yellow (beauty uk), to represent a scene quite frequently seen around that time. There were a lot of crocus flowers in those colors peaking through the snow. For me, seeing crocus flowers means that spring is slowly starting up. Hence the compromise.

It was a nice mani. I liked wearing it and got a couple of nice comments on it. I really love Winter Wonderland~ So worth finally having spent the money on it. It was a pain to take off though. Those flakies were quite tenacious. Also, the light purple shows up really well on my pictures, but it was not as obvious in real life. It turned out to be really close to Orly Winter Wonderland in indoor light.

What do you think? Are crocus flowers as common in your country as they're here in Germany?

Thanks for reading!

Fall into Autumn 5: Football

So today, I would like to show my football nails... I did them for the Fall into Autumn Challenge, and well, are supposed to be (American) Football nails, but I decided otherwise. I'm following a fellow challenge member who had the same problem I do: We can't relate very much to the sport. It's not a big thing here. I have never watched a game at all. It's different with football aka Fußball aka soccer though. I'm not a fan either, but I can relate to this sport. It's inevitable here in Germany. :D

What I came up with is still not very creative, but it was fun doing.

My pinky doesn't like to be photographed lately. It likes to hide or bend away from the rest. :D

Products I used for this mani include a grassgreen beauty uk polish (from my untrieds, yay), the every so often used and still unnamed Color Club white, some black acrylic paint and my beloved essence BTGN Top Sealer. I'm on my 7th bottle now!

And because I was asked to do some tutorials on how I do my nail art, I'll try to remember to take pictures while I'm painting. For this one, I remembered, but honestely... there's not much to explain. Hence, just three pictures.

Left: Paint your nails with base color of your choice
Middle: Paint the half moon white. I freehanded, but you could tape it off too
Right: Using black acrylic paint, add the pattern and seal with topcoat

Okay, I'll try to do a better job next time. ^^; This is new to me and I'm not very good at explaining...

The Lazy Days of Summer 12: Summer Nights

Yay, only three more manicures for the Lazy Days of Summer Challenge and one of them, I want to show you today! For this mani, I initially felt like doing a jelly sandwich again. I have done a blue one a couple of times already, so there had to be another aspect to this one.

I guess some of you (at least) also go inspiration hunting on Pinterest. From time to time there's a striped/border mani with palm trees showing up that feels very summery to me. But well, my theme is summer nights and that involves other colors than yellow, orange, pink and violet. Since I really find this mani pretty, I decided to use it as my inspiration anyway and change the colors so they fit my theme.

I applied this mani over Kiko 401 Peacock Green, which I still had on after the swatches.

For the jelly sandwich I used
- Kiko 401
- Kiko 336
- OPI Last Friday Night

and for the stripes (top-->down)
- China Glaze Midnight Mission
- Catrice Pool Party at Night
- Unnamed Color Club (violet)
- Unnamed beauty uk
- Unnamed Color Club (brown)
- black acrylic paint

On my pointer and pinky, I applied a coat of Kiko 336 Ink Blue over Kiko 401 Peacock Green. It's a bright blue jelly polish, which I find a little bit more difficult to apply compared to essence Cool and the Gang. On top of the jelly, I applied a coat of OPI Last Friday Night, topped it with a coat of diluted Kiko 336 and then applied another coat of OPI, because I found that the diluted Kiko covered up too much of the glitter.

I freehanded the stripes using a striper brush. I used cream polishes for the almost dark sunset sky and China Glaze Midnight Mission to hint a sky already showing stars. Kiko 401 is supposed to represent the sea, glittering in the moonlight. To hint the beach, I dabbed on a bit of a brown Color Club glitter.

For the black borders and the palm trees, I used acrylic paint, because it is easier to handle. I really suck at painting palm trees... Only once, I painted a couple decent ones on the nails of a colleague...

I have to admit that the pictures show this mani really well. In RL, most people could not see what I tried to paint. But okay... they wouldn't look as close up as my camera lens anyway.

So what do  you think of my dark palm trees against an almost dark sunset border mani? :D

The Lazy Days of Summer 2: Summer Ombre

Hi everyone~

I hope you're having a great weekend! Mine is almost over and it was sooooo short. But there's only three weeks left until my one-week vacation, yay.

Anyway, today I'm going to show you my Summer Ombre, second theme of the Summer challenge I'm participating in. I didn't do anything fancy this time. This is actually the first real ombre mani I did... hard to believe. I hadn't worn any orange in a while, so the color was decided. I didn't have much trouble finding some maching colors in my stash of untrieds. This is basically why I didn't do anything fancy... I wanted to use this mani to "swatch" a few of my untrieds. So glad I did...

For this mani, I picked only one polish that I had used before. It's the one on my middlefinger. It looks kind of pastel compared to the others, but be assured, it's absolutely not.

Pinky: unnamed beauty uk polish
Ring: OPI The "IT" Color
Middle: p2 notice me
Pointer: depend 124
Thumb: MNY 343

I wish there were more names, not only numbers. It's so hard to picture a polish just by some number.

The two yellow polishes were kind of sheer, but the beauty UK build nicely... not the OPI though. I think I did 5 coats to achieve the kind of opacity I was looking for. It turned out way more orange than it looks in the bottle too. I knew though, because I swatched them on a piece of paper beforehand. The OPI was very slow drying and of course, I smudged it.

The two yellow's glow very nicely in direct sunlight though, don't you think?

The two orange shades were what I expected. Three coats for the p2, two for the depend. I don't own many depend polishes, but the few I have are really opaque. I just wish the bottles were a bit bigger...

The orange on my thumb was a bit of a surprise too. Just like the OPI, it turned out way darker than it looks in the bottle. It's bordering to a light red in my opinion. I do like the shade though. It's a shame that MNY is no longer available in Germany. Can you still buy it somewhere else in Europe? That would be interesting.

That's it for my Summer Ombre. It was fun to do and I can see why people like ombre manis. For me, it is probably a little too undemanding. My colleagues even commented that this was a very unusual mani for me, haha. I like gradients better, so I'll stick with those when I don't feel like painting or sticking loads of pearls and rhinestones to my nails. ;)

Blood Oranges!

So this is kind of out of order... I'm soooo behind doing my blog posts... :S

Anyway, I was in a pretty bad mood yesterday and secluded myself to my room. This is one of the situations when I pretty much always end up doing nail art. The facebook group Polish-aholic Anonymous is doing themed Mondays every week and I have been looking at pictures of other member's work for the past few weeks. So I decided to do my first Monday Nail Art Challenge yesterday. This week's theme is fruits... I'm very much obsessed with blood orange tea right now, which is why I decided my mani was to be blood orange themed.

I love how the background of yellow and white turned out. It looked very pretty on its own. I can't really say what polishes I used for this mani, because I mixed them to get the kind of shade I was looking for. Let's say, I used a lot ^^; Especially for the oranges and reds. And I used some polishes for tthe very first time. :P

I didn't know where I put my dark brown polish, which I needed to do the twig, so I used brown eyeshadow pigment and clear polish to draw it. Not perfect, but it worked.

This mani is by far perfect. I still can't color round shapes, so they look 3-dimensional. I wonder if I will ever be able to. But the worst thing that happened was my impatience. I just couldn't wait for the colors to dry and applied top coat way to early. So some of the polishes got dragged. Oh well.