Challenge Your Nail Art: Penguins ft. Bundle Monster Fuzzy and Ferocious

Hello Readers!


Today's prompt for Challenge Your Nail Art is "penguins", and I am excited to see some cute little birds today! Bundle Monster's "Arctic Cuties" plate from the Fuzzy and Ferocious line was an obvious choice for this mani:

I decided to go for a dark background this time, so I started with Sinful Colors "konstellation" from the Kylie Jenner line- this is a gorgeous satin finish polish. I decided to use a matte topcoat to honor the original intention of the polish, but it turns out the ORLY matte topcoat is crap. Still, I did what  I could.

The penguin was a little tricky to make a decal with since penguins are black and white and I had a dark background. Here is the plate he lives on:

(You may be seeing more of this plate very soon- I have plans for the bottom middle reindeer image.) In the end, I made the decal with white polish and then went over and stamped select parts of the decal with black polish (the penguins feet, beak, and scarf) so they would show up better. I also had to add his eyes on. I could have stamped them on too, but I added them before I decided to go back and re-stamp some of the areas.

For the "ice" on the other nails, I used a plate from Bundle Monster's Time Machine Collection:

Finally, I felt like it needed a little something so I added the bow to finish it off.

ABC Nail Art Challenge: R is for R2D2

Hello Readers!

Now that the 31-Day challenge has ended, the ABC Nail art challenge is starting back up. (woo-hoo!)
For the letter "R" this week, I decided to do robot nails, and then decided I really wanted to use this  sneaky "R2-D2" image on the Bundle Monster "Time Machine" plates. It was later that I made the connection... R2-D2 starts with "R", duh, so these are R is for R2-D2, not robot.

For this mani, I started off with a base of Sinful Colors "Snow Me White." I recently ran out of my Sally Hansen "White On", and since I always seemed to have a hard time applying that polish, I decided to try a different white. I do like the Sinful Colors one better, but it is a little runny so you have to be careful about flooding with this polish. I added a couple of coats of Essie's "Peak of Chic", which is a glitter topper and is silver, so I thought it would go along with an R2-D2 look. I stamped over that with Sinful Colors "Endless Blue"  and a stamp from this Born Pretty plate:

My R2-D2 images come from this plate:

It makes me laugh to think about the designer's thought process. They obviously wanted to include R2 without a copyright infringement, so they added antenna and legs. See! It's not R2, just a generic robot. But when you actually stamp it out on your nails... it's totally R2. I did a little reverse stamping and added some rhinestones to keep with the R2 theme. Also of note on this plate: a Tie Fighter on the top middle-ish portion of the plate, and Star Trek symbols on the bottom left. You could also use the main humanoid robot face as C3PO, and the ray guns remind me of Toy Story. I feel like this plate is a must for any sci-fi fan. 

I also used a MoYou London typography plate to add his name to my thumb, just for fun. 

I hope you enjoyed this robot mani! I can't wait to see what everyone else came up with for the letter "R"!

31 Day Challenge: Metallic Starships

Hello Readers!

Today's prompt for the 31-Day challenge was metallic! I decided to try out a couple of untried metallic polishes and I based my color palette of of those colors and built my mani up from there.

Here's what I came up with:

My blue polish is "Liquid Iris" by Sinful Colors, which is a limited edition iridescent polish that's at Walgreens right now. It's kind of a blurple- in the light it gives off some purple shimmer that's not really apparent in the photos. My Silver metallic is "Faraway Galaxy" by Salon Perfect. This is a one-coater, which makes it awesome! The copper is "Beachy" from the Revlon Parfumerie line, and I stamped with a Bundle Monster stamping polish, "Freedom Ring".

My other hobby is paper crafting and greeting card design. I have always been enamored with learning all about design principles, and now that I am doing nail art I have been trying to find my sea legs and figure out how exactly all the design stuff fits in to painting tiny art on my nails. 

One classic trick of working with paper and mixing patterns is to include a pattern that has all of the colors you are going to be using to tie them all together, especially if you have a lot of different colors going on. So I decided since I would be working with a few different metallic shades, I would do a striped pattern on my ring finger to make it look like I was putting different metallics together on purpose.

For my middle finger, I used an image from a Bundle Monster plate, from the "Time Machine" collection. I thought all the metallics would lend themselves well to a kind of space or futuristic theme, and I just fell in love with this little robot figure.
Here's the plate I used:

I hope you enjoyed this mani! Thanks for checking it out, and be sure to check out the other metallic manis for the challenge here:

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