Day 28 Flag (Memorial Day Edition) – 31Challenge

I thought it was funny how the Rainbow Day fell near St. Patty’s Day and now Flag Inspiration Day is falling near Memorial Day.

I finally used my stamps for the stars, and it’s still a bit of a trial and error, but I think they came out alright, for my first time. I will get better at it. For the stripes I painted my nails white and then doubled the Nail Art Tape to make a little thicker line and painted the red.

Polishes I used were “Nail-aid Peeling Nail Base Coat”, “Essie – Aruba Blue” “Milani – White” and “Julep – Glenn” The Red bled a little bit because even though I used the same technique as the Pattern day, the Julep formula is a little more liquidy.

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Day 23 Inspired by a Movie – 31Challenge

I would like to start by saying,  Again, that I am in LOVE with Seche Vite’! When I did my Drying Drops articles and posts, many bloggers recommended it, but I just couldn’t see spending the money on a new top coat yet when I had just purchased the drops. Last week, I gave in, they had little minis at the Register of Image Beauty.  When I tell you this top coat dries in SECONDS I mean seconds! I tried it on the neon the other day and thought that maybe it was just because neon dries quickly anyway. After doing these nail arts and anyone that has worked with black polish can tell you how it bleeds or drags when you do top coat, I did not even wait for it to dry, put the top coat and WHAM Dry! wootz!

Anyway, onto the look, here we go 🙂 I am certainly no artist, if you play Draw Something with me you will know I draw stick figures 🙂

Here is a closer look of the nails:

And here is my inspiration:

Movie Images Provided by Google Images Search

The Polishes that I used were, “nail-aid Peeling Nails” as the base for all, Some of the nails were “Revlon – Coastal Surf” as base, one was “Elf – Medium Red” and “Spoiled Wet N Wild – Designated Driver” and “Julep – Kelly” The remaining colors were used for the art including some of the ones already listed “Elf – Light Red” , “Sally Hanson – Purple Pulse” “Julep – Oscar” “Milani – white”, “Essie – Vermillionaire”, “OPI – Planks A lot”, “Zoya – Shawn” , “Sinful Colors – Happy Ending”, “Ulta – Concrete Evidence”, “OPI – Fly”, Sinful Colors – Blackest Black”

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Day 19 Galaxies – 31Challenge

**Picture Heavy**

This Challenge made me feel like I was listening to the open credits/narration of the Twilight Zone. 🙂

I used This Tutorial as a guide for my Galaxy nails and it was very helpful! I  also did a  picture tutorial below. I absolutely loved doing this challenge, not only did it dry super quick because you are sponging, but you don’t have to be perfect on each nail. Part of the look is the blending and making each nail look like parts of the galaxy.

Polishes you will need: a Base Coat, a Top Coat, Black, Blue, Yellow, White, Purple and a glittery Top coat.

I used, L to R, “OPI- Top Coat” “Zoya – Charisma”, “Essie – Aruba Blue” , “Sinful Colors – Black on Black” , “Ulta – Cream of the Crop” , “Essie – Shrine of the Tides” and “Milani – white” and lastly I used my “Sally Hanson – White Nail Art Pen”(not shown “Nail-aid Peeling Nail” as a base)

Once my base coat was applied, per the tutorial, I painted one coat of  my “Black on Black”. Once that was dry, I ripped up a make up triangle sponge into 3-4 pieces. I put a few drops of “Milani – white” on a paper plate and dipped it in long ways, and once dabbing off the little extra made a line diagonally on each nail. This doesn’t have to be perfect, in fact you want it a little un-even and spread out so that it will show when you sponge the other colors.

The next step is to do the same thing but with yellow, put a strip of yellow in middle of the white.

Next you do same step as 1 & 2 but with purple, I chose the “Zoya – Charisma” as its brighter and kind of neon to add some vibrance. With the purple you do the same thing by using a sponge piece on the long end but this time you go down the diagonal line on either side just outside the white and kind of blend in.

The next step was blue, and again I used a shinier, blue to add more depth, my “Essie – Aruba Blue” with this one you can use a corner or a line again from the sponge but this time you just dab in all areas to add some blue to the “sky”

Next is your stars, you make different size dots, for this I added another drip of my white polish and used a toothpick, also used the Nail Art Pen for some.

Lastly you add a shimmery overlay. I used my “Essie  Shrine of the Tides” In the tutorial she used an opaque purple glitter polish. Beware, I have sponged polish all over my fingers, not pretty! 🙂

This is a picture of all cleaned up and out in the sun:

This is a picture of all cleaned up inside same lighting as used for rest of pictures:

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Day 17 – Glitter – 31Challenge

I am a little late with this post and I will be honest I kind of cheated, but NOT on purpose!! For the Glitter day of the Challenge, I used “Sally Hanson – Blizzard Blue” and the glitter was “E.l.f. – Twinkle”. The reason I say I cheated was because I feel like I did, I have all of these beautiful glitters upstairs but they are such a pain to take off. I really wanted to use my new Sally Hanson blue, figured it would be a nice Easter color, and then I haven’t used “Twinkle” in so long. So beware it’s not like, POW Glitter!

Here is another crappy picture of it, please excuse the clear all over my fingers. You can see from this picture the glitter dulled the blue color a little.

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I loved this combo and trust me these pictures did not do the look justice. The glitter was subtle but there was a lot and so hard to capture, and I just love this new blue.

Day 16 Tribal Nails – 31Challenge

Good Evening all, or for some Good Morning 🙂 I have been busier than normal lately and I apologize for my lack of posts 😦

The next Day in the Nail Challenge, was pretty time-consuming, but quite fun. I looked up some Tribal nail designs on Yahoo Images and noticed that there were so many variations in colors, and designs and I just went for it.  My left hand I painted purple with “Ulta-Celebutante” and my Right hand with “Sally Hanson – Mint Sorbet. the rest of the designs were mostly freehand.

Most of the black lines were done with the technique shown in my Rainbow Challenge  The remainder of the art was with a toothpick.

The colors other than above, were “Milani – White”, “Sinful Colors – Blackest Black”, “Wet N Wild – Designated Driver” and “Color Club in Lava Lamp”

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Day 12 Stripes (St Patrick’s day edition) – 31Challenge

I started this look on Thursday night and painted all of my fingers white as a base.  It felt like I waited forever for the base to dry… in reality it was about an hour and a half (which really, really sucked given what happened next…).

With this day of the challenge being stripes, I figured I would continue by cutting scotch tape strips and then paint over them. The very first one I tried to remove ripped the polish right off… so I waited another half  hour & came back to it to remove the other strips. That yielded better results, but after I had done all of my nails I ended up hating about 4 of them. Two of which because the water decals I used got “funky” and “gellish” like once I put top coat on.  Here is a picture of the decal before it got “funky”.

Before bed on Thursday in my frustration I took the polish off three of my fingernails and I agreed I would give it another go on Friday night. That’s precisely what I did (after a day at work with 3 naked nails…). Friday I repainted those nails and added the gold in between the stripes on most nails to give it some flare and represent a pot of gold. 🙂

Here is the final look

The polishes for this look were, “Milani – white” for the base on all nails. The Dark Green shown is “Ulta- Envy”, the light is “Revlon ColorStay – Bonsai” , the gold is “Julep – Oscar”, and the very light, almost just a shimmer of, green  is “OPI – Se ya later Sailor”.

All in all I liked the final result, sure it was challenging, but this was my first stripes and scotch tape attempt. i still love my nails and coming up with new ways to “Decorate” them, that will never change : )

And in Honor of St. Patrick’s Day I leave you with this:

May love and laughter light your days,
and warm your heart and home.
May good and faithful friends be yours,
wherever you may roam.
May peace and plenty bless your world
with joy that long endures.
May all life’s passing seasons
bring the best to you and yours!

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Day 9 Rainbow – 31Challenge

For the rainbow day of the Challenge I went with a nail-by-nail rainbow. As you can see I used a Lotttt of nail polish for this look, all nail polish no paints. I went to Michael’s Craft store and picked up about three different sized paint brushes for about $1.50 – $3.00 each to use when I do more art like this. I also used my dotting tools to make the 3 & 4 leaf clovers.

I found a trick on a fellow bloggers website [Check it Out!] for nail art and used it for the pot of gold itself. I drew it on Parchment paper and, when dry (about an hour cuz my black polish sucks!), I slowly scraped it off, adhered it to my nail, did the little 3 and 4 leaf clovers and gold, then did a top coat to hold it on. Thanks Carly for this awesome idea! 🙂  It really helped me to draw it on paper, lord knows I am no artist…

Here is my little pot o’ gold! You can’t have a rainbow without your pot o’ gold, especially with St. Patrick’s Day around the corner!

Here is a sneak peek at the finished pot of gold finger, the night before…

Here it is the next day, just another look…

My left hand the night before (so please ignore the nail polish on my fingers… 🙂 )

When I say day before or night before it’s because I always do my nails at night and then in the morning when my hands are all wet from showering I can just peel or pick the polish off of my fingers.

Originally my plan was to do an actual rainbow on my index finger rather than the different colors on each nail representing the color of the rainbow, but it was just not happening.

Here is a little closer look at one of my cloud fingers. I did my thumb and pinky on the Pot of gold hand. (night before 🙂 )

And… drumroll… Here is the finished product. (Again, night before 🙂 )

This look was sooo fun to do! I was very excited about how it came out.

Hope you enjoyed this look as much as I enjoyed creating it!

Polishes used for this Look:

Red was “Julep – Glenn”, Orange was “Spoiled – Wet N’ Wild – Don’t Be Cheesy”, Yellow “Spoiled Wet N’ Wild – Designated driver”, Green was “Revlon Colorstay – Bonsai”, Blue was “China Glaze – Sexy in the City” I also used that blue under my cloud fingers with “N.Y.C. – white” for the clouds with the paint brush and as a base for the pot of gold finger. For the Indigo I used “Essie – Go overboard” which was the closest thing I had to indigo and It came out darker than I planned, then the glitter made it more green The purple which was “Piggy Polish – Fear less”. For the green shamrocks I also used the green above, from the green finger. For the gold I used “Julep – Oscar” and the pot of gold on the parchment paper was my “Sinful colors- blackest black”. Oh almost forgot, I also used “Essie – Shrine of the Tides” for the little glitter flecks on every nail but the pot of gold nail.

I finished with my “OPI -Base and Top Coat”, and lastly my Drying Drops by OPI. –Which, let me tell ya, in this case was a Life Saver. The polish was so thick and there was so much of it in certain spots, it seemed like it was going to take forever to dry. So I followed the instructions and put the drops on 1 minute after the top coat, but then again for precaution. I did it one more time about 20-30 minutes later, just before bed. The next day… no sheet marks!!!

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Day 8 Metallic – 31Challenge

So this was Day 8 of the Nail Challenge – Metallic and I used my OPI Base and Top Coat and for Polish my new “china Glaze – Jitterbug”

This was one coat

This was two

Another view of two coats and the finished product!

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Day 6 violet – 31Challenge

I saw some other blogs that had used this polish that I wanted to check out. It’s the “Layla Magneffect polish” It was $15.00 at my local Ulta. It comes in a bunch of different colors. My Ulta had, gun-metal, Changing Lilac (which is the one I purchased), Blue Grey Flow, Turquoise Wave, Purple Galaxy, Golden Nugget, Metallic Sky, Velvet Groove, Golden Bronze, Brown Sugar, Silver Galaxy, and Black Metal. I also saw somewhere that they have other designs not just the line. My local Ulta only had the line. (See bottom of post for link to Ulta’s colors)

For the Nail Challenge I attempted my first shot at this, and one nail I touched my nail to the magnet accidentally and had to start over. For those of you that do not know how this polish works, I will explain.. You start off with your normal base coat just as you would and then paint a decent coat of the polish on your nail. (I did a thin coat and it didn’t work out quite as well I will explain) you then hold the magnet just above your nail for 5 seconds and it pulls the metals in the polish together making the design shown on the top of the polish bottle. The one I purchased was a line, you can hold it vertical, diagonal, horizontal etc, for this look I did horizontal. Anyway, back to why the thin coat did not work, so it is pulling the metals together and what it did was pull it so that the other spots on my finger nail barely had any polish and it did not look right.

The polish dried fairly quickly, I put my top coat on after about 5 minutes, then my Drying Drops and I was ready to go, I baked some cookies and put my hands in the oven mitts and didn’t get messed up!

Here are two more shots of the finished product 🙂

Here is the link for the other colors that Ulta carries: http://www.ulta.com/ulta/browse/productDetail.jsp?productId=xlsImpprod4070003#sku2242094

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Day 4 green – 31Challenge

I used “Ulta’s – Envy” for Day 4’s Challenge , green.

this is one coat, yes messy i know.. lol

Finished product in the sunlight.. still messy 🙂

All cleaned up 🙂 Finished product for Day 4’s in the 30 nail Challenge – Green

Hope you liked it!

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Day 1 Red – 31Challenge

This the first day of the Challenge, again remember for me, these looks will not be every day. I will be posting every couple of days, either when I get bored with the look or it starts to chip.

This is one coat of “e.l.f.’s Medium Red”

Two coats

This color is very light so I felt that I needed three coats as you still saw my nail

I then decided to paint my ring finger with the “NEW Spoiled by Wet n wild – Designated Driver” Yellow. This polish was awesome because it was only $1.99 but I felt it was harder to work with. It has a nice wide brush but it attracts a lot of polish to the brush. hard not to do thick coats. Seemed to take a little longer to dry as well probably as it was hard not to do thick coats, The picture above is 2 coats.

I had some address labels that I cut down and put it on my nail, I wanted to do a color fading effect with different shades.

I used “Spoiled by Wet n Wild – Don’t be cheesy” orange on the remainder of my nail then when dry used the red again on tip

This was Day 1 of the 31 Nail Challenge , hope you enjoyed!

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31 nail challenge

31 DAY NAIL CHALLENGE!

RULES:

• One post per day
• If you miss one, pick it up the next day
• Post a picture of each mani
• It would be nice if you listed/linked to what polishes you used
• For the inspiration prompts, SHOW US YOUR INSPIRATION/SHARE LINKS
• BE CREATIVE
• TRY NEW THINGS
• HAVE FUN!!!

NOTE: don’t want a new look every day? Go at your own pace! The big goal is to get through all 31 manicures… and notice how your skills grow!

so Ps i probably wont post one every day but am definitely excited to do this challenge, did my reds tonight! For those of you that haven’t done this yet, or hey want to do it again… lol feel free to join in, send me an email letting me know you want to join!

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