And Now For Something Completely Different; Accidental Freehand

Hello Readers!


Today's post was born as a #clairestelle8challenge post, and became something totally unexpected for me. The prompt was "spring flowers", and I feel like I've done a lot of spring floral manis and was fresh out of inspiration for that prompt, so I decided to go browsing on google images and found some really beautiful stuff. I fell in love with a watercolor image but didn't think I had much of a prayer of replicating it using stamping, so I decided to set a course of "assisted freehand", where I basically paint over stamped images.

...this is how it turned out. I'm not sure if this is ok or not, lol. I think it's ok, but freehand florals are not something I really have enough experience in to decide this. In any case, I'm not totally in love with how it...

Find this painting at dreamstime

Here is the beautiful inspiration piece. I fell in love with it and decided it was worth going out on a limb for. Of course, the flowers here are watercolor and I did not attempt a watercolor technique with this mani, so that's a big difference.

Also, I used a million polishes in this mani. Too many to list them all out, I think. So I'm featuring what I used for the background.

I started with two coats of Strawberry Milk on my pointer/pinky fingers, and three of Lemon Heaven on my ring/middle. Then I used cut up pieces of sponge to add more of those colors plus Silhouette until I had a background that somewhat resembled the watercolor. I added a layer of Pinksicle over that to blend the colors as well as add some shimmer.

Bundle Monster Secret Garden
BM-709

Bundle Monster Secret Garden
BM-713

So for my "assisted" part of the freehand, I stamped a couple of flower images with white polish over my background. I thought I would just trace over them with the polish. I ended up ignoring them for the most part, however, as they were hard to see, especially where they overlapped. BUT, I did find them helpful to create the profile-view flowers sticking out from the top, as well as for a guide to show me what area of the nail I wanted the flowers to cover.

 So, there you go: my first attempt at a sort of free-hand floral. What do you guys think?

Nail Crazies Unite: Hippy/Boho

Hello Readers!


Today's post is for the "Nail Crazies Unite" group on Facebook, and this week's prompt is "Hippy/Boho". The images that came to mind when I thought about that theme were blue skies, dreamcatchers, and woodgrain.

I decided to try a little bit of free hand sponging to try to make my cloudy background more realistic.

For my sky base, I used China Glaze "For Audrey" to make a nice deep, blue sky like the kind we see in the Southwest.

To create the clouds, I cut a tiny corner off of a sponge and held it with my tweezers. First I sponged on some white, then I added a tiny bit of grey over that for shading.

My dream catcher and "Dream Big" phrase come from this Bundle Monster plate from the "Festival" collection. I made a little decal with the dream catcher so I could fill it in a little bit.

My woodgrain image comes from another Bundle Monster plate, from the "Secret Garden" collection.

Finally, my little daisies come from this plate from the Born Pretty store; they are actually from one of the potted plant images but I just wanted the daisies because they remind me of flower crowns. I just placed the "pot" off of the nail.

Thanks for stopping by today- I hope you enjoyed this mani; this I think is one of my favorites! Check out the link-up below for more hippy/boho inspired nail art!

30 Days of Color: First Day of Spring ft. MoYou London Enchanted

Hello Readers!



Today's post is for this week's prompt at 30 Days of Color Challenge, which is "First Day of Spring!" I thought it would be fun to put a farm animal on my nails for this prompt, since I associate farm animals with spring for sure.

I decided to also try a wood grain background for my nails this time. I have really been loving the wood grain background looks lately!

I wanted to try a different color of wood grain this time, and I was also going for subtlety so I went with a base of "Yo Soy" and stamped over it with just slightly darker brown color.

My "unused" polish for the 30 Days of Color challenge is the purple, "Havana Good Time". This purple is part of the Spring Break collection for Sinful Colors this year.

My wood grain image came from this Bundle Monster plate, from the Secret Garden collection. 

I created a really simple decal from the sheep image off of this MoYou London Enchanted plate.

And finally, I created some smaller decals from the flower images off of this plate, also from Bundle Monster's Secret Garden collection.

Thanks for stopping by today! Be sure to check out some more spring-themed manis in the link-up below!

Butterfly Nails for Clairestelle8 ft. Sinful Colors Stoned Crystal Shimmer

Hello Readers!

Today's post is another one for the instagram collab #clairestelle8, and this time the prompt is "butterflies". I decided to go with one big butterfly so I could play with some of the beautiful new Sinful Colors polishes inside the wings.

 I love seeing the tiny specks of glitter inside of the wings, and the rich colors of these polishes.

So I actually used exclusively Sinful Colors polishes on this mani- not really on purpose. I just have a lot of these polishes. Actually, I picked up "Kashmere" at my Dollar Tree last week. My Dollar Tree has had a ton of the Kylie Jenner "Trend Matters" line lately, and they recently go a few new colors as well as a TON of the Revlon Parfumarie scented polishes. I saw a youtuber haul some of those from her Dollar Tree too, so if you are interested in them I would seriously suggest heading down there to see if you Dollar Tree has them! The Parfumarie polishes were on the cardboard cards instead of being loose.

My butterfly wings come from this Born Pretty plate. To get the mirror image, I simply kept one of the wings on my stamper head and stamped the other one onto my silicone mat before filling it in.

I also stamped some of these filigree images from this Bundle Monster plate, which was part of the "Secret Garden" collection. I stamped them in the gold over Kashmere, so it's subtle but I like the effect of it.

After I was all done I decided my mani needed some little gold studs, so I dug those out and stuck  them on just using topcoat. If you want them to last longer you can use nail glue, but I find the little studs always stay on just fine for me for several days just using topcoat under them and then painting over them with topcoat also.

If you would like to see more butterfly manis, check out the #clairestelle8march tag on instgram.

Simple Sunday 2/19/2017, with new Sinful Colors Stoned Crystal Shimmer

Hello Readers!


Today I am very excited to finally be trying out a polish from a new Sinful Colors collection that I have been trying to get my hands on for weeks. I finally spied it at Walgreens, and somehow half of it was already gone but I managed to grab up a few of the colors. This is the "Stoned Crystal Shimmer" collection, which has some pretty unusual shades that all have little shimmery flakies in them:

So here I used the color "Just Deserts", which is kind of the perfect nude color for my skin tone, so I was excited about that. I've been searching for a good nude for me for a while; nothing ever seems to be quite right but  I like this one a lot. I have two coats for the nude base on my pointer and pinky fingers here, though a lot of YouTubers said they needed 3 coats of this polish.

I used a stud on my middle nail and ended up painting over it for a subtle look.... I'm a little on the fence about whether I like how this looks or not.

I also found "Off Tropic" in the clearance bin of my Walgreens a couple of weeks ago. I'm always excited when I find polish in Walgreens' clearance bins because they always have really great clearance prices, unlike some other retailers I know... *cough cough TARGET*  This polish was a true one-coater for me, which is always awesome, and also means it's probably an awesome polish to stamp with.

I did something a little bit different for this mani, because yesterday I didn't have a design in mind or a specific plate I really wanted to use, so to find inspiration I flipped through the pages of a VOUGE copy that I recently received. I thought this picture would be fun to translate to nail art so that is what this mani is based off of. MoYou London has been posting all kinds of fashion-inspired manis this week and it made me want to try it out too! It was really fun to do so I may try basing a mani off of fashion again next time I'm feeling uninspired. 

My lacy patterns that I stamped over the nude base come from this Bundle Monster plate from the first blogger collab that they did. 

My roses also came from a Bundle Monster plate, this time from the Secret Garden collection. The roses on the right side of the plate here are kind of small, but as you can see it is possible to get a full nail image out of them. I used the pretty florals on the left side of the plate as a full nail image in another Simple Sunday mani awhile ago, also on shorter nails.

31 Day Challenge: Inspired by music- Gotye

Hello Readers!


Today's prompt for the 31-Day challenge is a super fun one, and I'm excited to be getting into these more creative prompts.

...so, music! Ever since the challenge started, I've had this wild idea to base my music mani off of the music video for "Somebody That I Used to Know" by Gotye. If you're not familiar with the video, it's a really strange/surreal one where the singer and a woman are painted into an abstract painting that's largely composed of neutral colored geometric shapes and a little bit of green toward the end. Here's a still shot from the music video:

I found this here

I've always wanted to do some form of artwork based on this concept, because I have always thought that it was really visually interesting. 

So, here is what I came up with:

To achieve this look, I simply started with a light pink, almost nude polish (LA Colors "Blushed"), and then added freehand lines across the nails with different colors. I stamped the face from a Bundle Monster plate, in the "Secret Garden" collection:

I'm not sure how much you can tell that it's supposed to be a face. Originally I shrank it down so it would be smaller on my nails, but it was even harder to tell what it was when it was the smaller size.

Check out some more song-inspired manis over here: 

An InLinkz Link-up

31 Day challenge: Roses and Lace

Hello Readers!

Today's prompt for the 31-Day Challenge is flowers! For such a seemingly easy prompt, I kind of had a hard time pinning down exactly what I wanted to do. Finally I decided to go with a look inspired by a tea cup.

My base color here is Sinful Colors "Mint2beCool". 

I have a small collection of pretty little teacups. There's just something about pretty teacup patterns that makes me swoon a little bit. This manicure was loosely based off of this teacup pattern:

wayfair

My roses pattern came from a Bundle Monster plate from the "Secret Garden" collection. I have a lot of different flower patterns, but for this mani I really wanted roses that  I could fill in, and apparently this is the only plate I have that has that:

I also used a plate I got for about $.75 off of Aliexpress. I bought it for all of the beautiful lace patterns, but the quality of it is not fantastic. Half of the time when I was stamping the lace onto my nails it didn't pick up completely. I noticed that the plate doesn't seem to be as deeply etched as the name-brand plates that are available. Here it is, though:

 It seems like ordering off of aliexpress is kind of a mixed bag. I've purchased plates that are of great quality, and then plates that are... not so great, but usually at least usable. This one fit that category: definitely pretty, useable, but it takes a little extra TLC.

Thanks for stopping by! Be sure to check out the other floral manis for the challenge over here:

An InLinkz Link-up

31 Day Challenge: Soft Gradient

Hello Readers!

For today's 31-day challenge, the prompt is gradient nails. The last of the "color" challenges, gradient is a lovely theme to wrap up this section of the prompts.

 I used a few Sinful Colors shades to create my gradient nails: "Lie-lac" (pictured), "Mint Apple" (green) and "Beaches and Cream" (offwhite). In the past I have been a bit heavy handed with my gradient attempts, so I decided to go with lighter colors this time since they always seem to be so lovey when other people do them. 

For my stamping, I used a plate I bought from Aliexpress (not sure if it's a dupe for anything):

So this plate was the inspiration for this mani- I thought the colors would mesh well with the lovely top row of patterns. But you notice... the top row of patterns do not appear on my nails. Unfortunately, the "love" and ampersand surrounded by leaves are all much too wide to fit on my nails. I suppose I could have attempted to shrink them, but I didn't think of it when I was doing my mani and I've never actually tried to shrink an image before. I did try to get the cute arrow images on my nails... and failed a lot of times. It turns out those long, skinny lines like to bend when you try to stamp them. I later realized that I could have fixed this issue by turning the image into a decal to make it all stay put. Still, I will note that the images on this plate are etched well and I didn't have any problems getting them onto the stamper, I just need to work on my stamping skills. >_<  

I did, however, manage to get the cute little rose and vine pattern onto all of my other nails. 

In the end I decided to use a swirly image from Bundle Monster's Secret Garden Collection on my accent nail:

Thanks for stopping by! Be sure to take a look at the other takes on a gradient design here:

An InLinkz Link-up

31 Day Challenge: Purple Nails

Hello Readers!

For today's prompt of the 31 day challenge, purple, I decided to go with a floral design because purple and flowers go so well together.

I started with the Parfumerie polish "Wild Violets", which is a lovely deep, almost black purple. I sponged on a little bit of Sinful Colors "Call Me" to lighten it up a little bit so you could tell it was purple and not black. 

For my accent fingers, I put on a base coat of Parfumerie "Fresh Linen", which is an off-white satin finish polish. I added some reverse stamping with this bundle monster plate from the Secret Garden collection:

After I applied my topcoat and I was trying to stamp my triangles on my middle finger, I accidentally smudged the design! Oh no! I tried to smooth it out as best I could, but it unfortunately still looks a little off. :/

On my middle finger I did some layered stamping with this Bundle Monster plate, from the CYO 2014 collection:

I used Sinful Colors "Call Me" and a Bundle Monster stamping polish, "nations treasure". I wasn't too crazy about how "Call Me" stamped- I thought it would go on a little bit darker. 

Be sure to check out the other purple mani's for this challenge!

An InLinkz Link-up