Rainbow Musical Nails

I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to update the blog lately, so I apologize for that.  These nails are from May, so even though I’m posting in June, I’m filing this under last month.

I really felt like doing a rainbow gradient across just the tips of my nails, so I had to pull out a whole arsenal of polishes for this one.  Pictured below from left to right are the following colors:

OPI- Privacy Please
Sephora by OPI- Curve-aceous
Sephora by OPI- Cab Fare
Formula X for Sephora- Danger Zone
Confetti- Ice Ice Baby
Sephora by OPI- Gleek Out
Sephora by OPI- Who Let the Dorks Out?
Formula X for Sephora- Hyped

I tried to pick polishes with shimmer in them so that the overall look would be more unified.

I started out by painting my nails with a nude color base.  You can opt to only do the gradient if you have nice looking nail beds, but I wanted to even out the tone.

Privacy Please by OPI- a neutral shade that makes it look like I have healthy nail beds.

Using a small sponge, I applied dabs of each color in rainbow order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.  Each nail has 2 colors on it starting with red on my thumb and ending in purple on my pinky.

The rainbow gradient is beautiful by itself.

I wanted my rainbow to have some more sparkle, so I added a stroke of Ice Ice Baby, an iridescent glitter, to the top half of each nail.

The lighting doesn’t pick up the different reflections of the glitter, but it’s there.

Finally I took craft smart Acrylic Paint in White and drew in a few lines with a striping brush to draw two lines across the tip of each nail.  I made little note heads with a dotting tool and painted in the stems with a detail brush.

The notes are entirely optional, but I wanted to acknowledge my music career with this design.

I think it’s pretty and represents what a colorful part music plays in our lives.

My two loves: my flute and nail art.

Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?  😉

Happy polishing!

Springtime Tulip Manicure

Nothing says spring like seeing tulips in bloom!  I wanted to put them on my nails, so I took advantage of plate BPL-029 from Born Pretty Store to help me out.

Blooms galore! I used the pattern in the 2nd row, 2nd image from the right and the single tulip image on the bottom left corner of the plate for this manicure.

The tulips that I have seen around here are mostly red, white, and yellow, so I used those colors for my palette.

Colors clockwise from the left: Cab Fare by Sephora by OPI, American as Apple Pie by Nicole by OPI, Konad Special Nail Polish in both White and Red, and Brigitte by Julep.

To start, I painted all my nails with Brigitte except for my ring finger, which I painted with American as Apple Pie.

Looks like a Valentine’s Day manicure so far.

I used a reverse stamping technique to color in some of the tulips, so after stamping my image with Konad Special Nail Polish in Red, I colored it in with a dotting tool.

I used Cab Fare to fill in random flowers on the image.

After letting the polish set for a little bit, I stamped the image onto my nail.

Repeat the above steps for the rest of the white nails, and you will end up with this look.

To make the stems green, I dipped a striping brush into craft smart acrylic paint in Grass Green and traced over the image.

I stamped a single large tulip onto my ring finger with Konad Special Nail Polish in White.

I also smudged my pinky in the process, but I was able to fix my mistake by scraping off the discolored white polish with an orange stick and filling in the area with Brigitte.  I use Seche Vite top coat, which smooths out uneven polish quite nicely, so you can’t even tell that made a mistake when you see the finished manicure.

After coloring in the stem and applying top coat, this manicure is done!

What do you love most about spring?  Let me know in the comments!

Happy polishing!

 

Springtime Floral Manicure

Ever have one of those days where you drop your nail polish brush and get polish on your pants and your camera and then find out that you smudged your nails in the process of trying to keep the brush from falling?  Yeah, that was me when I was trying to do this manicure.  I think I must be more burned out than I thought I was!

In any case, I love springtime because of all the beautiful flowers everywhere.  It started with seeing daffodils sprout up all over the place, but now the trees are also in full bloom.  It’s great that I have so many plates of floral patterns to match!

I decided to use plate BPL-029 from Born Pretty Store for this manicure.

Flowers upon flowers! I used the image in the top row, 3rd from the right.

Color palette for the day (left to right): Peace, Love & Green by Finger Paints, Born Pretty Stamping Nail Polish #12, Cab Fare by Sephora by OPI, Born Pretty Stamping Nail Polish #10, and b.m.c. nail lacquer in white.

I started out by painting my middle and ring finger nails with Cab Fare and the other three nails with Peace, Love & Green

After allowing the polish to dry, I applied gold striping tape to the tips of the green nails.

I wanted to get away with stamping the flowers on my nails without having to color in anything, but I wouldn’t have had a nice enough contrast in the design, so I had to make nail decals to color in the petals with white polish.

I used Born Pretty Stamping Polish #10 to transfer the design to a stamper.

With a small dotting tool, I colored in the flower petals with white stamping polish (used for its opacity).

After applying a layer of clear top coat over the whole design and letting it dry, you can peel the nail decal off the stamper.

After trimming down the decals to fit my nail beds, I applied another coat of clear polish over the yellow polish before placing the decals on top of my nails.

For the final step, I took advantage of my clear stamper to add green stamping polish over the stems and leaves of the pattern.

I started by stamping the entire image with Born Pretty Stamping Nail Polish #12.

Using Scotch tape, I removed the flowers from the design. I had to be quick so that the polish wouldn’t stick to the stamper, so I couldn’t be more precise about preserving every detail that I wanted to be green.

The clear stamper makes it much easier to line up the design over the existing one.

I know it wasn’t a perfect transfer, but it created a bit of a 3D effect as one of my friends pointed out.  Besides, how gorgeous does that look?  The contrasting white and green polish over the orange and yellow really makes the flowers and leaves stand out.

I’m still trying to find time to finish my taxes, but I hope to have more posts up soon!  One day at a time for me for now.

Happy polishing!

Q*bert Nail Art

After feeling so unsatisfied about my Matrix nails, I decided to look through my plate collection once again to try to find new inspiration.  This time I focused on the cube design on Cheeky Jumbo Plate 10 because it reminded me of Q*bert, a game I really sucked at because my age was in the single digits when I first saw my brothers playing it.  Q*bert was also featured in Wreck It Ralph and more recently in Pixels.

Cheeky Jumbo Plate 10. I used the cube design 2 rows from the bottom and 3 columns from the right.

Obviously I wanted to paint Q*bert, so I planned to put him on my thumbnail so that I could make him big enough to stand out.  I also decided to paint Coily, the snake who is out to get Q*bert on the board during game play, so I planned to put him on my ring finger.  To make the characters stand out, I used a plain black polish as a backdrop.  I wanted to put the cubes on the other nails, so for a base, I used yellow polish, decided to stamp with a blue one, and colored in the other squares with a red polish.

The color line up from left to right: b.m.c. nail lacquer- royal blue, Sephora by OPI- What’s a Tire Jack?, Sephora by OPI- Cab Fare, Sephora by OPI- And A Cherry On Top.

I painted the base colors first.

Buzzing around with yellow and black polish.

Cab Fare takes 3 coats of polish to look opaque, so I needed to wait for that to dry before I could do any stamping.  I used the time to paint Q*bert and Coily instead.

For the characters, I used acrylic paint by Craft Smart and various sized detail brushes.  You can follow the painting process in the photos below.

Q*bert step-by-step photo tutorial.

Coily step-by-step photo tutorial.

A note on Coily- I know he’s supposed to have more coils, but I don’t have long enough fingernails to paint the extra loops!  I think you get the picture, though.

All that was left to be done was the stamping.  I tried using all 3 of the stampers that I own to save time, but I have to say that the Konad stamper still works the best.  In any case, after stamping the pattern, I filled in the striped boxes with And A Cherry On Top.  I used the mini bottle of polish for this because I turned the brush for this bottle into a striping brush awhile ago (just cut off 3/4 of the bristles from the original brush).  If you do this yourself, you can use a dotting tool or a detail brush to fill in the red boxes.

Coloring in red boxes on a Konad stamper.

After transferring the pattern to my nails, here is the finished look:

Q*bert and Coily amidst their cubes.

For those keeping track of which stampers work the best, the Konad stamper was used for the pointer finger, a large and squishy stamper from Amazon was used for the middle finger, and a stamper from Born Pretty Store was used on the pinky.  You can see that the Konad stamper picked up every detail without a problem.  You can read the original review of these stampers here.

This is maybe not the cutest mani that I’ve done, but it certainly evokes a lot of nostalgia for the 80s and arcade games!  I might decide to revisit Q*bert again because I’ve decided that an all hand-painted design is more preferable to a half hand painted and half stamped one- at least for me.  But if you love gaming and don’t want to let Pac Man steal all the 80s thunder, Q*bert is a great option.  Have fun!