Alice in the Garden ft. MoYou London Alice in Wonderland

Hello Readers!


Today's mani revisits a newer plate from the Moyou London collection that I had a go at back in January, where I created a more simple mani inspired by old book pages. I've been wanting to go back and try coloring in the detailed classic illustration images on the plate, so that is what I have done here today:

These images were trickier than your average image to reverse stamp with, because the details are so tiny and the pen-drawn style makes them difficult to see. Keeping the design to just two colors to fill them in made it a little bit more straightforward to do.

I kept my color palette simple, and kind of garden inspired. I've been using this Sinful Colors pink color a lot lately- I guess it's becoming a favorite. I also made sure to use a "real" stamping polish since these images have so many tiny details.

Alice in Wonderland ft. MoYou London

Hello Readers!


Today I am excited to play with my new Alice in Wonderland plates by MoYou London. I just adore the newly released plate that features illustrations from the book, and I wanted to make my nails look like the pages of an aged copy of the literary classic.

I  debated whether I wanted to go with this darker neutral for the base, or a lighter Ivory color like Sinful Colors "Beaches and Cream", but in the end I went with Wet N Wild "Yo Soy" because it seemed like exactly the color of really old book pages. I considered adding a pop of color to this, but in the end I decided to keep it true to what you would see if you opened a real book. I included the stripes originally because they kind of reminded me of books lined up on a shelf, but I am not sure it really is obvious in the mani. I think it looks more like wacky wallpaper, perhaps in the room that Alice is standing in deciding whether or not to drink the bottle.

...which means my polish list is super short! I used this deep brown OPI to stamp with over the nude color. 

My illustration of Alice comes from this lovely plate. The details on this plate are just so amazing! The tiny pen strokes of the illustrations! Amazing.

 And of course, I had to use the coordinating typography plate to mimic the words on a page. Now, the phrases on this plate are mostly really too large to be able to fit the whole thing onto your nail in a way that it is readable. Some of the really small ones you'd be able to fit, but mostly not.

Finally, one of the newer Trend Hunter plates. I really, really wanted to get to play with this!

Nail Crazies Unite- I'm a little Teapot

Hello Readers!

Today I am very excited to bring you a mani based on the first prompt of a new nail art group on Facebook- Nail Crazies Unite! Hosted by the talented Cheyenne of CBDNails, It's designed to go hand-in-hand with the 26 Great Nail Art Ideas challenge. Both challenges post every other week, so that if you decide to do both you will be posting a mani once a week.

The first prompt for this challenge is coffee! Seems very appropriate for a fall mani. Since I am not a coffee drinker, I decided to go down a related route and feature a teapot on my nails.

I tried a new technique for this mani, and I am excited that it worked. When I was thinking about the colors I wanted to use, I spied these lovely water decals. I thought they would be fun to use as a pattern for a teapot, since one of my favorite things about drinking tea is the beautiful patterns on the teacups and pots. I decided to try stamping onto a water decal. After I stamped the teapot, I got my trusty teflon scissors and carefully cut around the image. Then when it was time, I simply soaked the teapot decal and placed it onto my nails!

For my other fingers, I started with a base of Sinful Colors "Rich in Heart" and applied the full nail water decals partway up the nail to get a kind of half-moon effect.

I painted Pure Ice "Shore Bet" onto my ring finger, then used the cardstock from the leftover water decals to mask off part of my stamping plate so I could get a straight edge to make a frame for my teapot image. 

My teapot comes from the MoYou London "Alice in Wonderland" collection:

..and I just pulled some filigree images from a Bundle Monster "Secret Garden" plate

Hope you enjoyed this mani! I am looking forward to completing more of these fun prompts with this group! Check out more coffee themed manis in the link-up:

An InLinkz Link-up

Challenge Your Nail Art: Red

Hello Readers!

I created this mani for the Facebook group "Challenge Your Nail Art" October prompt, "red". When I was coming up with the idea in my head, I pictured the red being more dominant, but hey the mani uses red as a main color so I'm saying it counts!

For this mani, I used these polishes:

..as well as several stamping plates. I was excited to try out a couple of plates from new Bundle Monster "House of Horrors" Halloween collection. I used the "Cabinet of Curiosities" plate for the skeleton image, and the one with phrases on it for my phrase:

I also used this classic MoYou London plate from the Holy Shapes collection to stamp in my background triangles:

I used the triangle image with the triangle cutout from this plate exclusively on this mani. I simply put the polish on the top triangle and scraped up so the only thing in my stamper was a smaller triangle image. I overlapped two of these on my pinky finger for the double-point effect. 

My playing card image comes from the MoYou London "Alice in Wonderland" collection:

And there you have it: A Halloween mani that leans more towards the spooky side of things.

Challenge Your Nail Art: Orange

Hello Readers!

For the 'orange' prompt for the October Challenge Your Nail art prompts, I decided to go in the direction of a Halloween classic: candy corn. I ran into a few technical issues along the way, and while I'm not crazy about the end result, I thought the idea was fun so here it is:

My main frustration with this mani was my stamping polish. I was hoping for a vibrant orange when I stamped it over the black, but it ended up kind of muddy. I used  "Teepee Tipping" which is a Bundle Monster polish intended for stamping. I also used it to stamp the candy corn, and the "eat me" star, and in those cases I was able to get a better saturation of it because I was doing a decal and I backed it with white polish. However, it wasn't really possible to do that on those faces. I could have painted those nails orange and stamped over it in black, but I was hoping for a pumpkin look. In the end I decided to keep it, if only to show you guys what it looks like so you don't go stamping this orange over black hoping for a deeply saturated look. 

Here are my supplies for this mani:

Those faces are from a MoYou London plate (top), from the Alice in Wonderland collection. They are intended to be the Cheshire Cat's grin, but I thought they would be fun for a Halloween theme. The "eat me" stamp also is from MoYou London "Alice in Wonderland". My candy corn nail was painstakingly pieced together from those two little candy corn images on the gingerbread house plate, which is a MoYou Dupe. 

I placed the rhinestones in hopes of pulling a deeper saturated orange tone; I wish they were a darker orange to match the candy corn but this was the best I had in my stash.