Asian Dragon

I went a little crazy painting my nails this weekend. But it was fun. ^^
I wanted to paint an asian dragon over all my nails. That seemed okay, but while I was painting I realized, that right now my nails are either too small for this kind of painting, or I simply drew too big. Maybe a little of both.

For my dragon manicure, I mainly used
- A-England Dragon (noooo, not the reason I drew a dragon at all...) body
- Kiko 395 body
- Flormar SuperShine 07 body outline
- Priti NYC Queen Victoria back
- China Glaze Riveting details on the back
- OPI My vampire is buff background

Since I really battled with my hand while trying to take pictures, I decided to take seperate pictures as well and just put them together... My hand is not flexible enough. ;( Wow! to all those ladies who can bend their hand to take proper pictures like that...

just the dragons body...

in cloudy daylight

I actually used polishes only (ok, except for the dragon's teeth)! I really like how the scales turned out. I ended up doing them differently from my plan, but it works. I just wish my nails were longer. I would have loved to paint more than one foot... and more~ tail.

So, what do you think of my excessive painting? Do you agree that a bit more space to paint on might have been good?

I'm going to upload my dragon to Kayla's indie polish contest. There are some really nice manis uploaded my close to 40 other nail artists. ^^

Ok, thanks for reading~ Tomorrow, I'll continue with my pastels.

From the Vault: Dragon!

One challenge done, the next post for the other not quite due yet... and loooots of old manicures sitting in the photo folder. So it appears to be obvious to work on getting those manis out~

This spring, I won the 300 follower giveaway over at Charlottes-Nails. The prize was an a-england polish of my choice and after going through a lot of swatches online, I decided on Dragon - my first a-england polish! It's a gorgeous green polish with a light holographic effect and copper shimmer. Just like what I imagine dragon scales to look like. So when it arrived at my house (shipping was really fast!), I immediately had to put it on my nails... which have been extremly short back then. It must have been very shortly after my major nail breakage.

I wore a-england Dragon solo for a day and got a lot of comments at work. People recognized the beauty without knowing that it is a special polish indeed. I forgot to take pictures that afternoon though. But because my nails were so short, I somehow ended up with crazy tip wear when I got home from work the next day. Some simple nail art had to cover up that fact, so I turned it into a framed mani. For the frame, I used Flormar SuperShine 07, a pretty copper shade that is very opaque. I decided on this shade, because it seemed to pick up the underlying copper shimmer in Dragon. The copper shimmer is barely visible in my pictures, but it's there.

Have you tried a-england polishes? What do you think of this particular shade?

Thanks again to Charlotte for hosting this giveaway and thus, giving me the chance to win this beauty. I'm very happy with it~

LDTTWC Day 1 - I should have been born in...

... or rather not. Anyway, I decided to participate in yet another challenge. I just loved the themes from the challenge and well, it's not the first challenge by Lindsay from Neverland Nail Blog I'm participating in. The last one was great and I'm sure this one will be too!

Lindsay's newest piece of work is the "Let's do the Time Warp" Challenge that's going to consist of 8 themes just like the Girly Girl Challenge did. This one will be challenging, because it's no "go at your own pace" challenge. I do prefer the latter.. but the themes were just great. So many ideas! Please take a look!

For Day 1, we are supposed to create a manicure that represents an era we would have loved to live in. I didn't exactly chose a time I'd like to live in, but a time I'd like to experience. When I was still in school, I was very obsessed with palaeontology. My dreams of digging up amazing stuff were ruined by the job counselor we had to go to in 11th grade. She made it very clear that it would be absolute nonsense to even think about studying about it.

When I researched later (13th grade), I found out that it was indeed an occupation that very little people get to do... but I had developed other interests in the meantime and well, ended up studying about one of theme. I never lost interest in palaeontology though and I still love to read books about it, read about the newest discoveries and watch all kinds of documentaries. If I had the chance to travel back in time, I'd like to take a look at earlier stages of life on this planet. The mani I created is supposed to represent some of those stages.

On my pointer, I tried to paint a scene with some early humans, the mammoth on my middlefnger is self-explanatory. My ringfinger is supposed to represent a carboniferous forest. Finally, on my pinky I tried to give some credit to marine life too, but I kinda failed here. Should have painted some trilobites instead, haha.

I used so many different polishes for this mani, that I'm not going to write them all down. The mammoth and the humans were painted using acrylic paints aside from polish. And I sponged a lot for this mani.

What do you think? I'm really proud of my mammoth. I think it turned out the best out of the four scenes. I really feel like watching some documentaries now... :D