The Lazy Days of Summer 11: Summer Days

Hello~

first of all, I want to thank all of you have been commenting on my last post. It means a lot to me that I got this feedback. I'm definitely not going to stop posting in English, but I wanted to know if my readers would like me to post in German too. Well, there are a couple of days left and the post is not even 24 hours old, so I'll wait for now.

Anyway, before I'm going to face the heat again when I'm at work, I would like to show you my next Challenge item. The eleventh theme was "Summer Days" and I had a couple ideas on what to do for this one. I decided to let my love for Japan come through once more.

The first summer I spent in Japan back in 2007 was probably the best in my life so far. I had so much fun with all the other international and local students there. The weather was just awesome and I really loved the region. (I stayed in northern Aomori prefecture) So I wanted to do something that represents a part of the summer there. Festivals are a big thing every summer and every festival has these goldfish catch game for kids. You have to use a tiny paper fan to catch a goldfish from a shallow tub. I never actually tried, but I loved to watch the kids when they did.

To achieve my mani, I used white as my base color (uh, yes... again), because I didn't know how opaque the later sponging would be. I don't remember what colors I used for the sponging... I think it was a blue by Catrice and the usual unnamed white by Color Club.

Next, I painted the goldfish. I used red acrylic paint and watered it down a lot. I wanted the goldfish to look a bit like an aquarell, which I tried to achieve by layering the watered down red. It really looked that way, but it doesn't really show up on the pictures. With black and white, I added the eyes.

Next, I watered down some white acrylic paint to draw the white lines. I didn't want them to be too prominent. For the silver lines I actually used some polish, a silver striper by essence. It turned out to be a little too strong. I wanted those lines to be more subtle... oh well.

Lastly, a dabbed on a tiny bit of glitter and topped it with essence BTGN Top Sealer. I'm on my 6th bottle now... I love that topcoat.

I was really pleased with this mani. Loved it. What do you think? Is it summer days appropriate?

Okay... gonna face the heat now... Have a great day!

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

Studded sponging experiment

Today's mani is obviously not part of the Spring Challenge. I'm not finished with my nails yet and I'm not sure if I'll manage to post them today.

Today's nails were done a while ago on a whim. I just felt like playing around and trying stuff I wanted to do for a while. I had gotten so much nail art stuff that was still unused. I always feel bad about my buying habits... What makes me want to post about this mani is a small contest held by Dani from Dani's Beauty Blog to celebrate her blogiversary. It ends today and I forgot to post the blogpost I had almost finished preparing, but since I didn't like what I did anymore, I'm rewriting it. :P Well, Dani basically wants her contestants to show her some inspirational nail art and I just thought that my experiment might be inspirational to her, because the experimental part is easily done and I'm pretty sure she has the stuff I used.

So here's what my evening sponging experiment looked like.

There were actually three things I wanted to try that night. First was to see how the silver email color I just bought is behaving. It's not meant to be used on nails, but I had read on several stamping sites that it works great for stamping because it's so highly pigmented. It is indeed and one pot of 14ml cost me less than a bottle of polish! Second was the striping tape that had just arrived in the mail. I experienced something similar to yesterday's mani, but I had completely forgotten about that. My top coat (same as yesterday's) was peeling off and the color was a bit faded the next day, but not as badly.

But what I wanted to try most was sponging using the scratchy side of a cleaning sponge. I don't know where I read about it anymore. It was last year, I'm pretty sure... took me a while to finally try it. Using the scratchy side creates a completely different effect, but I loved how it looked. Basically, it's the same as using a regular (makeup) sponge, but the texture makes the difference. I roughed it up a little bit, because it's a bit too flat on its own. Not enough texture.

So for the sponged nails, I painted my nails white using essie Marshmallow and let that dry completely. This time this was really important, because the scratchy sponge can actually pick up some of the base color if it's not dry enough. Then, I cut a little piece out of my big kitchen sponge, dipped it into black polish and then started sponging lightly. I tried to sponge triangle shapes on two of the nails. On those nails, I added another triangle in black. Afterwards, I cut some striping tape to cover the "edges" of my triangles. My ring finger also got a tiny bit of gold polish sponged upon as well as a few gold studs.

The remaining two nails were painted black first (p2 eternal). Using a tiny brush (I used size 3/0, but I cut away about half of the brush hairs) and my newly bought silver email color (Revell #90), I freehanded the flowers and dots. I had to find out that email color takes longer to try than regular polish, which means that topcoat has to be applied later. I smudged my silver a bit, because I didn't know.

There's only one picture, sadly. When I looked through my usable pictures, I found out that they all looked somewhat alike. Boring. But here's a picture of what I used.

So that's my experiment. I'm not saying it's overall successful. There was something I didn't like about it. Not sure what though.

What do you think? Did you try sponging with the scratchy side?