Challenge Your Nail Art: Snowflakes

Hello Readers!

Today's post is for the Challenge Your Nail Art group on Facebook, where there are prompts for every odd day of the month of December! December 3rd's challenge is "snowflakes", so I decided to break out a little bit of Olaf since he feels so at home in the snow.

When I was planning this manicure, I was having a difficult time deciding which polish to use as a base color, mostly because I wanted to use a glitter with it and I wasn't sure how the stamping was going to look over the glitter. So I decided to make a kind of swatch worksheet to compare how some different colors were going to look to help me decide.

Basically I just swatched a bunch of colors I thought could work, then put the glitter- OPI "So Elegant"- over top, and finally stamped the snowflake images so I could get a sneak peek of what the final result would look like for each color. I ended up choosing Sinful Colors "Kurtain Kall", but  NYC's "Skyline Blue" was a close runner-up. 

Here's my final palette:

I used a peel-off basecoat because I was working with glitter, and I can't stand trying to remove glitter with nail polish remover; it's the worst. However, I will note that sometimes this base coat does peel off before I am ready, so if I'm using it it means I plan on doing my nails again tomorrow night.

My Olaf plate is an ebay one-dollar-wonder:

I don't know who a lot of the characters on this plate are, but it is awesome because it has Jack Skellington.

And my snowflake images come from Bundle Monster's Winter Holiday plate collection:

I realized when I was uploading this that the glare in the corner of the plate that I didn't think was a big deal when photographing it is actually obscuring the plate number *facepalm*. Maybe I should re-take the picture, but I'm just not that dedicated so I'll just tell you the plate number: BM-S213.

31 Day Challenge: Inspired by Minions

Hello Readers!

Today's prompt for the 31-Day Challenge is "inspired by a movie". To preface this, when I bought this stamping plate I told myself I'd probably never make a Minions manicure. However, this week my son has been watching Despicable Me and I figured eh, why not jump on the Minion bandwagon and give it a try. So, I give you: Minions.

I had fun cutting up the decals and placing parts of them onto my nails. I wanted to make the minions extra mischievous. :) 

The gray and black stripe represents the main villain's scarf:

I used a plate with some random characters (mostly minions) that I got off of Aliexpress:

Thanks for stopping by! Check out the other movie-inspired manis here:

An InLinkz Link-up

31 Day Challenge: Nightmare Before Christmas themed Half Moons

Hello Readers!

Today for the 31-Day challenge is half-moons. This isn't a look I normally go after because it requires the use of tape... or freehand... but the challenge says half-moons, so half-moons is what I made.

And it may be a little bit early for Halloween-y manicures, but I really wanted to use the "Italian Leather" color and it inspired me to also use a Jack Skellington stamping image.

Originally I was going to use reinforcement holes to create my half-moons, but after trying that on my right hand (my "practice hand" lol) I it would be easier to just free-hand it. I can never get the darn stickers stuck down enough to create a decent barrier and the polish seeps through, so I end up having to touch it up so much anyway that ends up being easier to just do freehand. So these are my freehand half-moons.

I paired the Parfumerie "Italian Leather" polish with Sinful Colors "Lie-Lac" because purple is a very Nightmare Before Christmas color. I made a decal with this stamping plate:

from aliexpress

The stamping plate didn't give me any troubles; it stamped easily and perfectly. 

My spiderweb comes from a Bundle Monster plate from their holiday collection:

Thanks for stopping by! Check out more half-moon looks here:

An InLinkz Link-up