Friday Triad: inspired by @badgirlnails (again)

Hi everyone,


the last Friday of the month means Michelle, Juanita and me get to play with colors again. This time Juanita chose the inspiration and she predicted she would get death threats... and I can't say I wasn't tempted! I mean, come on, spiders? For real? (in case you don't know, I totally am a city girl and I despise crawly creepy insects) So be warned if you want to check out the manicure that was the inspiration for my nails (that are way less scary ;)

I started out by creating the decal I wanted to use: an orange pumpkin. So I painted a small square of clear polish on my silicone mat, stamped a small pumpkin from B. loves plates B.09 Spooky Halloween using Hit the Bottle As Black As Night on it and filled the inside with orange holo Cirque Colors Valencia and olive green creme OPI Olive for Green. Valencia wasn't completely opaque so I painted some OPI It's a Piazza Cake over it to make sure the orange pumpkin would remain orange when I put it over a dark base. I left this to dry completely.

The first nail that got painted was the textured nail, my middle finger. I covered it with two coats of Zoya London, a medium gray PixieDust and a thin coat of Zoya Dahlia (London's black sister) to get closer to the color I had in mind. It turned out a bit too dark so I added a barely there coat of London to lighten it up a bit.

After that I painted all my nails with Hema 406 Spicy Grey, a fairly dark gray creme. I needed 2 thin coats (3 on my thumb) to reach full opacity. Using Hema 404 Hold the Dike, a medium gray creme, and a sponge I created a gradient on my ring finger with the lightest color at the tip and the darkest near my cuticle. I dabbed a little bit of INM Out the Door Northern Lights on the darkest part to make it look like twinkling stars in the night sky. Next I used As Black As Night to stamp a gnarly tree from UberChic Halloween-01 at the side of my nail and filled up the evil face that was in the original image. I peeled the decal off the mat, placed it at the foot of the tree, pressed it firmly on my nail and covered everything with a generous coat of Seche Vite to keep it in place and bring back the holo sparkle in the pumpkin.

When looking at my nails I realized the color of my middle finger wasn't right so I grabbed a new piece of sponge and dabbed some Hema 406 (the darkest gray) on top. Of course that meant that most of the glitter was covered so I kept dabbing London, Dahlia, Hema 406 and Northern Lights until I was satisfied (read: I couldn't get it any better and I was afraid I would really mess things up if I kept trying). And then all I had to do was overlook the battlefield that was formerly known as my desk, take a deep breath and start cleaning up...


The polishes I used (way too many to fit in one picture so the polishes used for the decal get their separate spotlight):

Hema 406 Spicey Grey, Hema 404 Hold the Dike, Zoya Dahlia, Zoya London, INM Out the Door Northern Lights

Cirque Colors Valencia, OPI It's a Piazza Cake, OPI Olive for Green, Hit the Bottle As Black As Night

I've struggled with this manicure for almost a month, ever since Juanita mailed her choice. I really liked the colors and the gradient and of course the Halloween theme but I didn't want to use a sheer base as my nails are quite discolored at the moment and I'm not even going to mention the spider ;) It was only after I let go of using a spiderweb that the ideas started coming that resulted in my current manicure. I'm still not sure if it does the original any justice but I guess that's the beauty of 'inspired by'. I hope you like my not-so-scary Halloween nails too!

Just in case you're muttering I should taken better pictures, you're absolutely right. Unfortunately all I can offer is a close-up of the accent nail... and it still has that annoying shine from my lamp on it, but at least you can see the tree a bit better. I think that's going to be my goal for the near future, learn how to take better pictures! Anyway, here's my ring finger:

To see what Michelle and Juanita did, just click their names and poof, you're there!



Zoya London, Zoya Dahlia and Cirque Colors Valencia were bought from Pretty Polish.
Hit the Bottle As Black As Night was bought from Hypnotic Polish.