Night Sky

I have started another semester of college.  I graduate with my associate's degree in childhood education at the end of this one, so I am pretty excited.  The other night I went to my school for a night class and looked up at the sky.  It was a deep blue which faded into a light yellow at the horizon.  The moon was a crescent.  I was inspired to create a manicure based on how pretty it was.

I started out with a coat of Essie Protein Base Coat.  I then painted on two coats of Sinful Colors Unicorn, a very light yellow.  I applied a coat of Sally Hansen Dries Instantly after that so the sponge wouldn't take off my base color.  

I put four colors on my sponge.  I painted on a stripe of Sinful Colors Black on Black, Sinful Colors Into the Blue, Rimmel Blue Eyed Girl, and a very thin stripe of Sinful Colors Unicorn.  I then stippled that over my nails with the black at the cuticle.  

If I were to do this again, I would have immediately applied another coat of Sally Hansen Dries Instantly to make the gradient blend better.  Since I waited, I was left with a slightly grainy effect.  It's not bad, but it could have looked smoother.  I am really happy with it anyway, though.

I eventually applied a coat of Sally Hansen Dries Instantly over everything but my ring finger.  I used a dotting tool and white acrylic paint to dot on the moon.  I then put a drop of my black polish and my darkest blue touching each other on a piece of paper and I dipped in a dotting tool so I could match the dot which created the crescent moon to the background a little bit better.  In person, it doesn't stand out quite as much as it does in the pictures.

After applying Dries Instantly over all the nails, I applied two coats of NYC Matte Me Crazy, a matte top coat.  I wanted to make my night skies look a little more realistic by taking out the shine.

Green With Purple Polka Dots

I have been doing my nails, but have just not been feeling like blogging.  I took pictures of all of my manicures for future posts, though.  Here's the manicure that I have on my nails now:

I started out with a coat of Essie Protein Base Coat.  I then painted on two coats of Essie Mojito Madness.  When that was dry, I took a small dotting tool and created my polka dot pattern.  The purple is Pure Ice Lacquered Lilacs.  

The way I did this was to make a dot in the center of every nail and then make a line of dots down the center on each nail.  I then created alternating lines of polka dots on either side on the center line.  If you follow these directions for creating polka dots, you can achieve perfect polka dots.  This trick really helped me.  

I finished off with two coats of Sally Hansen Dries Instantly.

Bright Tricolor

Hey, guys!  Happy 2015!  

I started out with a coat of Essie Protein Base Coat.  I then got out my striping tape.  I used 40 pieces of tape in all to create this manicure.  Here is what I did:

I applied a piece of tape about a third down my nail from my cuticle.  I then took Confetti Cherries Jubilee and painted it onto that 1/3 of my nail.  It got onto my cuticles since I was working in such a small space, but I cleaned everything up at the end with a nail art brush dipped into acetone.  Don't be afraid to get a little messy!  You can clean it up!

I immediately removed the tape after applying the color.  I was left with a third of my nails painted.  I made sure to apply all my colors thickly so that I could get them opaque with one coat. 

I applied Sally Hansen Dries Instantly over my 1/3 painted nails.  I then applied two pieces of striping tape to each nail.  I applied one so it just covored the edge of the pink paint so that when I applied the next color you would not see any bare nail between them.  The other piece of tape I applied two thirds down from the cuticle.  I then filled in that middle section with Revlon Vintage Rose. 

Again, I removed the tape right away and waited for the polish to dry.  I then applied another coat of Dries Instantly to protect my progress from being lifted up by the next tape.

I then applied a piece of tape to each nail covering the edge of the rose polish and painted the tips with Essie No More Film, a very dark purple (I love this polish.)  I, again, removed the tape right away.

I finished off the manicure with two coats of Dries Instantly.

I have a substantial collection of nail polish that I have acquired over the years and I would love to do swatches so I can show you guys nice colors.  I do not buy expensive polishes.  The most expensive I buy is Essie, and I try to only buy ones that are on sale.  So, I am thinking I could occasionally throw in a swatch instead of nail art and maybe you guys would see a color you'd like to buy.  I customize my white balance on my camera to attempt to get a very accurate depiction of my colors.  I buy most of my polish from Walmart.  Buying online can be good too!  How do you guys feel about that?  Would you be interested?