Ocean Manicure

I LOVE THIS MANICURE!  It's so cute and fun and I never wanted to take it off hahaha :)

I did this all with dotting tools (my nail art brushes are still in the mail).  

For the gradient I used Nails inc. Baker Street, China Glaze For Audrey, China Glaze Sky High Top, and Sally Hansen Mint Sorbet.  

Ring finger:  China Glaze Stone Cold for the rock, China Glaze Flip Flop Fantasy for the starfish, and Wet N Wild Black Creme for the suction cup thingys

Middle finger:  China Glaze Entourage for the seaweed, and Sally Hansen Mellow Yellow for the fishy

Ring finger:  Sally Hansen Sun Kissed for the octopus

Pinky finger:  OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls and China Glaze For Audrey for the bubbles.

Whew!  Lotsa polishes :)  Nowww enjoy the pictures:

Thanks for looking! <3

A Tutorial in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

My first tutorial (for galaxy nails)!  Yay celebrate okay done now let's just jump straight to the pictures :)

(Also, for some reason whenever I edit my pictures my fingers turn super red.  Just want to say my fingers are an actual normal color!)

 Step 1:  Paint your nails two coats of a blue/green polish (I used: Essence Choose Me!) 

Don't worry about it being perfect, you can fix that after the whole manicure is done :)

 Step 1.5: Rip off a small piece of a makeup sponge and hold it with a tweezer

 Step 2: Once your base color is dry, use your tweezer-sponge combo to randomly sponge on a darker blue polish (I used: Sally Hansen Blue It)

 Step 3:  Sponge the edges of the dark blue with a lighter blue (I used: China Glaze Sky High Top)

 Step 4: Sponge the edges of the lighter blue with a green (I used: China Glaze Entourage)

 Step 5: Sponge the edges (are you seeing a pattern?) of the green with a mint green (I used: Sally Hansen Mint Sorbet)

 Step 6: Lay down a bunch of newspaper.  Then, using acrylic paint and a stiff toothbrush (preferably one you don't/won't use), run your finger over the toothbrush-with-paint to create flecks ("stars").  This can get a bit messy :) 

Wash the excess acrylic paint off with soap and water.

 Step 7:  Add some stars that are closer (therefore bigger) to the viewer.  I used dotting tools.  My actual star-shaped-stars aren't wonderful, and I realize that ;)

 Step 8:  Add a little holographic polish to certain plain areas of your galaxy (I used: Rimmel London Lasting Finish Pro Top Coat with Spectraflair mixed in)

 Homemade holographic top coat!

 Step 9:  Top coat and cleanup.  

 There you have it!  Your own galaxy :)

 HOLO!

I accidently smudged my middle finger, so you can kinda see the Essence base polish :P

Ta da!  Loooots of pictures!  I was really really happy with how this turned out.  I've been watching galaxy tutorials for weeks but I was always nervous of screwing it up.  But it really is true that there's no way to screw it up!  So go for it!

A Manicure at the Lake

So last Tuesday my neighbor let my mom, sister, and I use her lake cabin for a day :)  It was completely relaxing and sunny, but of course I had to do my nails there ;)

I used 3 thin coats of China Glaze Something Sweet.  I'm not sure if the air there is different or it was the sun, but each coat dried super fast; faster than usual.

Then I took Sinful Colors Time Off, a black striper, and drew squiggly lines over my nails like this.  (If you can't tell by now, ChalkboardNails is a huge inspiration for most of my nail designs hahaha)

Sun sun sun sun <3

And Goldie, our family's dog, before she jumped off a 3 foot wall and tore something in her leg that day :(

And a duck.  Any post from a lake needs a picture of a duck!!

Matching Ruffles

I wanted to match my dress with some awesome nails, so I decided to do these ruffle nails that Sarah at Chalkboard Nails did.  I messed up in a few places, but overall I really like them :)  I used a base coat of China Glaze For Audrey, and then did the ruffles with China Glaze Hey Sailor, Sally Hansen Mellow Yellow, and China Glaze Bermuda Breakaway.

Photo from urbanoutfitters.com

This is the dress I have that I matched the colors to :)  Although looking at it now, there isn't really any dark blue in the dress...oh well.  We'll call it artistic license ;)

Black and White Dots

Most creative title ever, amiright?

So I've been on a dotting streak ever since I got my dotting tools and this is something simple I did :)

I used two thin coats of Sinful Colors Snow Me White and then dipped them in cold water for 2 minutes to harden them up for taping.  Then I diagonally taped off the white and painted over it with Wet N Wild Black Creme.  Theeeen I used a medium sized dotting took and did polka dots with the same black.  Top coat and done!

Nothing fancy! :) I have some cooler stuff coming up hahaha

Jalalalala!

Jalalalala: n. exclamation made by tribal persons in reverence of triumph.  (Urban Dictionary)

Tribal nails!  I've wanted to do this for forever, but I didn't have a black striper.  However, I got one at Rite Aid a couple weeks ago and so I finally tackled this design.  Now, it's far from perfect (in both my crooked lines and inconsistency in the thickness), but it was my first time using a striper so I'm cutting myself some slack :)

I used one coat of Sinful Colors Snow Me White, Sinful Colors Ocean Side (blue), China Glaze Foie Gras (brown), and Sinful Colors Time Off (the black striper).

There was no way I could do that on my right hand, so I just did color-coordination :)

First attempt at tribal nails: check!  I can't wait to improve my striping skills and then try it again :)

Ikat Design

I hopped on the ikat bandwagon!  It was a pretty easy hop too :)  While I was sitting at my desk, stumped on what to do on my nails, I started surfing YouTube (since that was obviously the only solution ;)

I came across a simple tutorial of an ikat design, and thought, "Hey!  I can do that!"  

Two coats of Sinful Colors Ocean Side, some blobs of Sinful Colors Snow Me White, some smaller blobs of China Glaze Bermuda Breakaway, and some lines made with Sinful Colors Time Off later, I had an ikat manicure!

Ikat is a super easy design to do and turns out looking really amazing.  Definitely check out the tutorial and try them for yourself! :D

Fancy Braided Nails

New. Favorite. Manicure.

It's simple, it's easy, and it looks  i n c r e d i b l e.  I am in love :)

I followed cutepolish's tutorial on YouTube here.  I used Sally Hansen Celeb City (silver), Sally Hansen Blue It (blue), and China Glaze Flip Flop Fantasy (neon pink).  For my non-accent nails, I used one coat of Blue It.

No more talk!  Enjoy the pictures and be sure to check out the tutorial!!

New watermark font! ;)

This is gonna be very hard for me to take off!  But it's so easy to do I'm sure I'll recreate it with different colors eventually :)

Katy Perry Inspired

Katy Perry inspired, and Lauren Doherty failed.

This was a good idea in theory, but the execution absolutely fell through.  I took this off within a few hours haha

I started with Love & Beauty in Coral (from Forever 21), and stamped with Konad White and BM-220.  

The main thing that was horrible was that I didn't center my french tips well enough and they ended up all wonky and crooked.  Oh well!  There's always next time :)

The inspiration.  I realize my manicure is pretty far off, but it was the best my limited skills could do :)

Photo credit: teen.com

Crappy picture, but it shows the shimmer :)

Scrapbooking Boom!

I did something I've wanted to do for a while, use scrapbooking scissors to cut tape to create an AWESOME manicure.  And so I did it.  With a little help :)

I started with two thin coats of Sinful Colors Boom Boom.  I soaked my nails in cold water for 2 minutes to harden them, and then my sister cut the tape with some funky scrapbooking scissors.  It was intense!  Since the scissors were all crazy, they wouldn't cut the tape unless you held it a certain way and a certain taughtness and squeezed the scissors together :P  

Once my sister mastered the art of cutting shaped tape, I put them on my nails and painted one coat of China Glaze Stone Cold, a matte grey from the Hunger Games collection.

 I put Seche vite on the pink part to maintain the shiny-ness, and Essie Matte About You top coat on the grey.  I really liked having two different finishes :)

Teamwork! :) Thanks for reading <3

Watermelon Moon

My first time trying half moons!  I really liked how it turned out, despite all the imperfections :) I started with one coat of Sinful Colors Snow Me White, and then dipped my nails in a sink full of cold water to harden them up quicker (it's an amazing trick and it works so well!  Leave them in the water for about 2 minutes or so and they should be ready for taping :)

Then I took paper-hole reinforcements (the kind you buy at Staples, they look like little white donut stickers haha!) and lined them up along my cuticle.  I used China Glaze Watermelon Rind to paint the majority of the nail.  It was perfect, but I had to go back for a second coat of Watermelon Rind because it's sort of sheer, but I had taken the stickers off so I got some brushstrokes on the white :P Oh well!  Rookie mistake ;)

Watermelon Rind is still kind of sheer and brushstroke-y, but it's acceptable for a first attempt haha!  Thanks for reading <3