Challenge Your Nail Art: Presents

Hello Readers!



For today's Challenge Your Nail Art prompt, "presents", I decided to go with kind of a toy theme to represent what you might find inside of a present, especially a child's present.

For this mani, I started off with my favorite navy blue polish, "Navy I Do" by Sinful Colors. This polish is a one-coater and I love how it stamps, too!
I used BMC "Jungle Mirage", which is a stamping polish, for most of my stamping here.

My inspiration for this mani came from this MoYou London dupe from Aliexpress, which has a kind of nutcracker theme but what really inspired me was all the sweet little toy images. I only used the little teddy bear from the plate, but it was where the idea started:

I thought my teddy bear needed a frame, so I used one of my favorite MoYou London plates to make it a little frame. I tend to use this plate more for the 3 frame images at the bottom than for the alphabet, although the alphabet is very fun and useful as well!

My bow also comes from a MoYou London plate, this time the adorable emoji themed plate. I was kind of surprised that this is one of only two bow images in my plate collection! Looking at the mani now, I realize I placed the bow too high on the ribbons (which I stamped with MoYou London Holy Shapes 05) and it looks a bit "off", but oh well.

Finally, my airplane and car images come from this Born Pretty Store plate, which features a lot of really fun and quirky images.

Nail Crazies Unite: Holiday Movie

Hello Readers!

Today I am so excited to share my holiday movie inspired nails for the Nail Crazies Unite group on Facebook! I decided to go with one of my favorite holiday movies, "Elf".

"The fastest way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear!" I used a lot of different plates in this mani, because mixing and matching is what I like to do over here!

First off, let's have a look at the polishes:

Sunlit grass, two coats, for thumb-middle-ring, and one coat of Snow Me White followed by one of Fresh Linen for pointer-pinky.

So let's start of on the plates for pointer-pinky, the music notes with holly sprigs. I wanted to give the feeling of sheet of Christmas music because it is a major theme in the movie. For the music pattern I used a plate from the MoYou London Rockstar collection, and then placed a decal made from a Bundle Monster holiday collection plate:

Of course, I had to add a little elf in, and my elf comes from a dupe of a MoYou London plate from the fairytale collection:

This plate has a few images I can see being fun for Christmas- the elves of course, but I think the scissors would be fun for a wrapping presents themed manicure, and the buttons for a snowman theme.

For my thumb I made a decal from another Bundle Monster holiday plate. I am kicking myself a little bit for forgetting to keep it on the stamper head instead of making the decal on my silicone mat, which is why the word "list" is backwards.

I'm planning on using the Christmas lights image in another mani this December! 

So finally, the middle, which was a combination of freehand and using this MoYou London holy shapes plate as a guide:

I painted my fingernail yellow, then added green about 2/3 of the way down. Next I stamped a thin solid stripe in black and stamped a bigger square over it. I went over those guides with black again for opacity, and added a little gold stamping above it to represent the stitching on the elf character's coat. Then I added a little gold outline inside the square for a belt buckle. It represents the main character's elf costume:

So *whew* that's it! I hope you enjoyed this mani, I thought it turned out really cute! Check out some more holiday movie themed manis in the link up!

An InLinkz Link-up

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.

Simple Sunday: Ballerina Nails

Hello Readers!


It's been awhile since I have been able to do a Simple Sunday post, since I have been all tied up with the 31-day challenge. Actually, today's Sunday post didn't turn out to be quite as simple as I was hoping, though the techniques are simple enough I had a little trouble figuring out what polishes were going to work best for the stamping I was doing, so I ended up re-doing it a few times. Here is the final result:

So for this mani, I used a combination of water slide decals, stamping, and a 3-D accent. The water slide decals are on my pointer and pinky, as well as my thumb. For my middle and ring, I started with two coats of Sinful Colors "Angelik" from the Kylie Jenner line. I did some background stamping for my ballerina using BMC polish in "Freedom Ring", and this stamping plate from Bundle Monster:

Then I added some stamping from this plate, which is everywhere on ebay and aliexpress and is a dupe for a MoYou London plate from the "Fairytale" collection:

Now, the etching on the dupe is not as deep as the authentic MoYou London plates, but I did not have any problems getting the image to pick up. I did, however, notice a difference in the opacity of the stamping with the dupe compared to a real MoYou plate. Because it is not etched as deeply, there is less polish on the stamping image so it doesn't stamp as dark. I got around this for my ballerina image by filling in the solid areas with more black polish and a toothpick, because I didn't really like how light the black polish looked. I was also using Wet N Wild black polish, so I'm sure if you have real black stamping polish it would come out better. That being said, I didn't have any bald patches in the open areas that I stamped using this plate, so I was impressed about that. 

For the middle finger, I used the ballerina's skirt from this plate, placing the image halfway down my nails, and I added a line with...

...this brand new plate from MoYou London! I'm really excited about this plate, because it the images are designed to be overlapped together to make advanced stamping techniques easier. I'm going to have some fun playing with this! This time, I just used one of the super-useful solid lines to make an easy stripe on my nail. I did take a toothpick and fill it in, just because some of the black stamping was showing through my red polish before I went over it again. 

Finally, I added a rhinestone heart. 

Thanks for stopping by today! I hope you enjoyed this mani, and hope to see you here again. 

-Midnight Stamper