Showing posts with label green. Show all posts
    Showing posts with label green. Show all posts

  • Hi everyone!


    It's time for the prompt I was looking forward to least of all... French Tip (it's actually a toss-up between Negative Space and French tips as neither is quite my style). But French tips it is, so I set out to do a 'proper' French manicure this time. Although I didn't feel like doing white tips and there was a gorgeous green polish on my desk so I decided to do a trial run on my bare (read: base coated) nails and see what it looked like. And this is what I looked at when I stopped fiddling:


  • Hi everyone, 


    months ago when a friend and I were chatting, I told her my husband got me another crazy colored polish, Cirque Colors High Society, a neon green with copper shimmer and a scattering of holo sparkles. She immediately decided I just had to use it for the silver and green prompt, and as that prompt has finally arrived here's the order 😉


  • Hi everyone!


    The 30th prompt for the 52 week nail art challenge is Saran wrap. I have to admit a saran wrap manicure isn't one of my favourite techniques as it usually turns out too chaotic for my liking. But since this challenge is all about getting out of my comfort zone, of course I couldn't back down. Let me show you the result and after that I'll tell you what I did.



    I started out by coaxing my husband into shaking my terribly separated China Glaze Elephant Walk for at least five minutes until it was returned to its original, evenly colored dusty grayish-green beauty. When it was useable again, I painted two thin coats on all nails and discovered there is very fine silver shimmer hidden it, making the polish look even better than I had thought at first.

    When the base was dry, I tore off a strip of saran wrap, scrunched it together to a small ball, unraveled it and scrunched it up again until I was happy with the amount of little 'corners' showing up. I then painted a small patch of Painted Polish Herb Your Enthusiasm, a lovely sage green polish with fine holo sparkles and some scattered golden flakies (I didn't see any flakies in my patch but I can see them in the bottle). I dabbed my saran ball in the patch, and started dabbing at my nails.

    Unfortunately the polish didn't really show up on Elephant Walk so I decided to grab a polish that was a lot lighter, Sally Hansen Green Tea which is a mint green creme. A new piece of saran wrap, the same procedure: make a ball, paint a patch of polish, dab the ball in the polish, dab the ball with polish on my nails. This started to look a lot better! There was a bit too much mint for what I had in mind by then, so I went in with another ball and Elephant Walk to darken the lightest parts, and Green Tea again where things got too dark, etc.

    When I was finally happy with what I saw, I did a last round of careful dabbing using Kinetics Sparkling, a warm marigold to bronze mixture of small glitters and flakies. It looks quite orange in the bottle but scattered around on my nails the gold shows up better. All that was needed at that point was a generous coat of Seche Vite on all nails and a camera to capture the first saran wrap manicure I actually liked when I finished it 😉


    These are the polishes I used:

    China Glaze Elephant Walk, Painted Polish Herb Your Enthusiasm, Sally Hansen Green Tea, Kinetics Sparkle


    Let me start with the most shocking part (to me anyway): I like this! A lot!!! In fact, I am still wearing this manicure as I type this and I don't want to take it off, that's how much I like it 😊 I guess I can handle the chaotic result of saran wrap a lot better if the colors match instead of clash, so I definitely want to try more of this as a background for stamping. What do you think? Yay or nay?


    Last but not least, I finally managed to cross off another prompt of what has to be the longest-running challenge in the nail art universe, the SBB Nail Challenge. Saran wrap is on number 39, and I've done it!


  • Hi everyone!


    It's the last Friday of the month and for the last three years and a bit that has meant a Triad manicure would be online. Unfortunately both the Triads and the My polish your plate posts have been put on hold for a while until real life decides to slow down and play nice again for all of us, and sometimes polish just has to take a back seat for a while.

    So instead of a Triad manicure I would like to show you a polish that I fell in love with the moment I saw it. To me it's the perfect Spring green and the added holo sparkles and golden shimmer make it even more magical. Take a look:


  • Hi everyone!


    Another episode of My polish, your plate where Michelle and I challenge each other to do a manicure with the polish one of us chose and the stamping plate picked by the other. This time Michelle went for OPI Was It All Just a Dream? from the Grease collection of 2018 and I chose the daisy-like image from the fifth row, second column of Lina Feeling Shapely! 05. Let me show you what my version of the combination looks like:


  • Hi everyone!


    This time the theme is Mythical creature and my first thought was... dragon! I didn't want to do a full dragon though, I don't have the necessary freehand skills or a plate with a dragon that I like, so I opted for dragon scales, regal green to gold ones:


  • Hi everyone!


    It's the eighth time Michelle and I challenge each other to do a manicure with a polish one of us chose and a plate chosen by the other. This time I picked ILNP Paige and Michelle settled on the flower image from Pueen plate 112. I'm not sure if my nails are 100% compliant with the rule that the chosen polish should be a prominent part of the manicure but there is no way I could have used that polish and that image in any other way. Here is what I did:


  • Hi everyone!


    The 14th episode of the 52 week nail art challenge... we're at 25% already! This week the theme is Scrollwork and this is my version that sort of happened accidentally when I was playing with my newest pretties:


  • Hi everyone!


    Another post in the My polish, your plate series. This week Michelle picked the polish and the plate was my choice. Michelle picked a glitter... I'll let that sink in for a while... a glitter! And of course the chosen polish has to be really present in the manicure we do with it so I had to step way out of my comfort zone and finally managed to create this:


  • Hi everyone!


    This week's theme is Half Moon. Apparently this type of manicure became popular in the 1920s. It's almost 100 years later but it still hasn't become popular with me, so I wasn't looking forward to this prompt. That is until I saw a gorgeous manicure by @helenepiuk and within an hour, this was the result of that blast of inspiration:


  • Hi everyone!


    This week's theme couldn't have come at a better time. The prompt is 'Unused polish' and my husband spoiled me rotten with a huge box of Masura polishes so the biggest problem was what polish to use :) I settled on some pretty holographic polishes that reminded me of Spring and ice cream:

  • Hi everyone!


    It's the third time Michelle and I challenge each other with a polish one of us picks and an image of a stamping plate to use with it is chosen by the other. This time Michelle picked China Glaze Glittering Garland as polish and the plate I selected is Hello Maniology (formerly Bundle Monster) BM-412, the top image with the interlocking dots.

    This is what I created with them:



  • Hi everyone!


    This week's prompt for the 52 week nail art challenge is Metallic. Usually, I stamp with metallics/chromes and mattify them, but this time I wanted to try something different and leave my nails glossy. This is the result:


  • Hi everyone!


    The second prompt of the 52 week nail art challenge is School. The first thing that I think of when I think about school is the huge blackboard that was hanging on the wall and the teacher using her pointer to focus our attention on something... or slapping the same pointer against the board if we didn't stop making a ruckus (but that fortunately for both pointer and board didn't happen too often ;) Also, our blackboards weren't black at all, they were dark green and when you held the chalk the wrong way, they produced the most horrible squeaking sound that can still send shivers down my spine just thinking about it!

    Since manicures are usually soundless, I left that part out of my highly impractical rendition of the blackboard of my youth:


  • Hi everyone!


    The last Friday of the month, and actually the last Friday of 2019! Wow, this year has been an out-of-control roller coaster with major lows (my kitchen nightmare 😱) and huge highs (my dream kitchen 😍), and with way too little nail art posts, but at least one per month for the Friday Triad. This is the last one of this year and I got to pick the manicure that Michelle, Juanita and myself would use as inspiration for our own nails. I picked a very season inappropriate pumpkin manicure by Melissa aka @melcisme. I did this on purpose because I didn't know when the other ladies would wear their manicures so maybe they didn't want to go for Winter (as it's Summer on the Southern hemisphere) or the holidays at all. This way everyone could do what she liked. Also, it doesn't need a horribly complicated technique which is a huge pro in the busiest month of the year.

    I myself decided to go all-out Christmas, complete with red, white, green and gold:


  • Hi everyone!


    I wanted to do a happy, colorful manicure so I started out... by picking gray and white ;)
    Of course I picked those non-colors for a reason, I wanted them to look nice with the yellow I had in mind. Yellow didn't happen though because I spotted the beautifullest (yep, I've decided that's a word) lime green bottle when I was searching for... what was that color again? So green it was... and that's how this happened:


  • Hi everyone,


    Surprised to see me? Me too!

    To be honest, I didn't think I was going to make it this month. Last year we decided to get our kitchen redone. All was planned perfectly and we should have had only one week of mayhem, after which I would have a gorgeous new kitchen. Sounds simple, right? Wrong! You probably guessed it, for most of the last four weeks I've been surrounded with chaos, dust, plaster, paint and all other stuff that guys apparently thrive on and that forced me to put my entire stash in storage to keep my beauties safe.

    So much for my plans to join the 52 Week Nail Art Challenge 2019 edition... (but I hope to catch up once all is back to normal). But nothing could keep me from the Triad manicure! So I picked the colors and the plate I wanted to use by googling swatches and reviews on my mobile, wrote down the names, made my husband dig up the bottles as he went to get some more things we needed and went over to my mom to paint my nails and take pictures with her camera as mine is... ehm... somewhere I can't find it at the moment.

    But all obstacles aside, here's my version of Michelle's pick by Nails by Jema:


  • Hi everyone!

    Can you believe it's the last day of November 2018 already? I still feel like someone secretly stole a week or two as this month has zipped by with lightning speed! But my calendar shows it is the last Friday of the month so it's time for the Triad manicure again. And boy, this one was TOUGH!

    Michelle picked a pretty summer manicure by Paulina from Paulina's Passions... that was completely freehanded! Of course you all know I can't freehand a stick figure, let alone an entire manicure! So I already knew I would be stamping stuff on my nails. But I really didn't feel any summer vibes so I decided I was going for contrast, opposites, turn this thing into a wintery scene! And that's where the trouble started. I picked a gorgeous white that resembled fresh snow, I had the perfect pine green and... I pulled a blank... a huge blank... the biggest blank in history! I literally spent two weeks trying to figure out what to do and nothing came to me. I even started on a manicure and it resulted to nothing (well, a lot of frustrations ;)

    On Thursday evening (yep, yesterday) I desperately went to once again look at the video that Paulina had recorded to see if maybe freehanding something would be possible after all. When I read the title, something clicked inside my brain at last. Her nails were inspired by a Hawaiian shirt! (don't ask me why I didn't see that before... I guess a frustrated brain doesn't work that well) And while I don't like the pattern for clothing, I do like the combination of big leaves and flowers so I put all previously selected polishes and plates aside and went on a hunt for materials I could use in a Hawaiian shirt manicure that would still fit my non-summer mood... and I think I succeeded, see:


  • Hi everyone!


    My husband did it again... a short while ago he surprised me with a new stamping plate: UberChic Art Deco Chic and a beautiful little collection of three autumn polishes by a Russian brand called Tips Polish. The moment I saw the plate, one image immediately jumped out and when looking at the polishes I knew what I wanted to do. And I'm so happy this came out just like I envisioned it!


  • Hi everyone!


    The last Friday of the month means Juanita, Michelle and me get to show you how a manicure one of us chose has inspired us to do a similar (or completely different) manicure. You guessed it, it's Friday Triad time :)

    This time Juanita chose this manicure by Hannah from @hannys_manis. I remember showing it to my husband when J shared it and telling him I had no clue how to NOT exactly recreate it (except for the negative space... I don't like it on my nails so I won't do it if I can avoid it ;) Two days later I was putting away the polishes for my attempt at scrollwork and I spotted a polish that not just sparked some inspiration but caused an entire explosion in my brain. I immediately saw the entire thing in my mind... and less than an hour later it was on my nails, exactly how I envisioned it. And then I realized I had to wait another month to show it off... Today the waiting is finally over though, here's my version of Hannah's spring roses nails:



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