Boo!
Yay for Halloween! My absolute favourite celebration. I love all this spookiness, and the fun that comes with it. It's impossible to think of it without having a bit of a smile to yourself. And so many nailart ideas to play with of course. These days it's hard to come up with anything that hasn't been done before, and last year I stressed myself out trying to do so. I did come up with my favourite nailart ever last year though, and will post a picture further down this post. If you can't wait, the link is (here)
So anyway, as I was saying, this year I decided I'd pick a tutorial and give it a try. I'm terrible when it comes to looking at other peoples stuff, and only usually look at things that pop up in my Twitter feed or YouTube subscriptions, so it was nice to make an effort to go out and see what everyone's got on their nails this season.
Alot of it was too cutesy for me, because as far as I'm concerned, it should at least be a bit spooky! So I decided after looking at hours of tutorials, to give this VIDEO a try by Gorgeous Nails.
And here's the result:
Now, typically for me, there are some elements of this that I'm not 100% happy with. I wish I hadn't made the two crosses on the middle nails lean the same way, and I would have been a bit happier with the bat on my index finger if I'd worked on it a bit more. However, the tree on my little finger is only there because I made a massive blob on my nail accidentally, and that came out alot better than I would have thought, so a good save there for me.
I did this look by painting all my fingers with OPI's My Boyfriend Scales Walls, then using black acrylic paint and my spotter brush to draw in the details.
Here's another pic:
In real life this actually looks pretty good, and I'm thinking some kind of gradient behind it might make it really special. Very tempted to give it another go for the big day. Everything of course was topped off with a coat of Seche.
I've booked November 1st off as a holiday from work this year (yay!) so I can have a drink, a bit of a one-girl celebration with a bottle of red wine and some spooky movies. And lots of popcorn of course! My favourite is Metcalfes Skinny Sweet & Salt (link) which seems to be relatively guilt free and oh so yummy. Looking forward to it already! Not sure which films to watch yet though.
Here's one last pic of this years halloween manicure, in close-up:
And, as promised, here's a pic of last years nailart, inspired by the Blair Witch Project:
Interestingly and co-incidentally, my nails look to be almost exactly the same shape and length as they were last year! That's pretty weird considering they've been all sorts of lengths and shapes this year. This is probably my favourite nailart ever. Spooky-wooky.
Anyway, make sure you mosey on over and check out the scaaarrrryyyyyy offerings from the rest of the crew:
Catrine at Unnaked Nails (link)
Michelle at Labmuffin (link)
Maria at Maria's Nail Polish Blog (link)
Melanie at Nail and Polish (link)
Emily at An Accent Nail (link)
Ameerah at Valiantly Varnished (link)
Anna & Haylee at Makeup and Masala (link)
Rosemarie at Every Little Polish (link)
Anna at Makeup N More (link)
I'd love to know what your favourite halloween nail look is!
Until next time...
MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~
I've got some mojo back, yay! This is the manicure I wanted to do for the Artsy Wednesday Disney week, but I just couldn't make it work. I absolutely love the book Alice in Wonderland, and I've wanted to put a representation of it on my nails for a long time.
My favourite character in the book is the Cheshire Cat, so he's the centrepiece of my creation. One of my favourite quotes from the book is:
Alice "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where –" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"– so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
Simple yet clever. A sign of great writing, and the book's like that all the way through.
So without further ado, here's what I came up with:
I painted the Cheshire Cat mid-disappear. I'm not completely heartless though, so gave him a nice branch to sit on.
The playing card characters are actually stickers, which I got from Amazon, here's the (link), and here's what you get:
Some of these are a bit too cutesy for me, and I probably won't use them, but for £3.25 with free shipping, I don't mind that too much. They are quite thick, and as you can see I had a little bit of wrinkling, but in real life you can hardly tell.
So here's another pic, and then I'll go through what I did:
So, I started off with kitty cat. I painted my nail with Nails Inc Albert Place, which is one of my go-to light blues. I then put a coat of Seche on it to dry it quickly. Then I used a silver Sally Hansen nailart pen to sketch out the design. I like this because it doesn't matter too much if it's not exactly perfect, as you hardly see it at the end.
Then I drew in the branch with a brown Precision striper, and the leaves with a Color Club green striper.
Then I used my spotter brush and black acrylic paint to place out the mouth and eyes. Once that was dry I filled in the eyes with green acrylic paint, and made the teeth with white acrylic paint. Then I filled in his pupils and nmade a little highlight in his eyes, again with acrylic paint. I then went over the whole thing with a coat of Seche, being VERY careful not to drag the design after all that painting!
The green nails (representing the Queen of Hearts croquet lawn) are one thick coat of Barry M Gelly in Key Lime, and the white nail (as a nod to the White Rabbit) is OPI's My Boyfriend Scales Walls.
A coat of Seche then went over everything to dry it in a reasonable time, and smooth out the stickers.
Here's a close up of my Cheshire Cat nail:
You can just about see the silver pen I used to sketch out the design under his right eye. In real life it kind of makes it look 3-D, which is pretty cool.
And here's the tools of the trade:
If you haven't read the book, I wholeheartedly recommend that you give it a go, it's a real delight. And if you do, please let me know what you think of it!
Until next time...
MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~
Hi All!
Here I am again with this weeks Artsy Wednesday. The last Artsy Wednesday was Disney, and I had quite a good idea for it, but every way I tried to do it, it just came out in a mess. Eventually I got that stressed out with it that I decided not to put anything at all up. I think sometimes you have to know when you're beat haha.
This week is quite a straightforward theme of crystals. I am a total magpie, so I have plenty of pretty shiny things to put on my nails. The challenge for me was to try to come up with something a little bit original, and hopefully I've managed that.
Here's what I came up with:
The base polish is the lovely A-England Tristam. Here it looks like it has a silver sparkle in it, but in real life that's a very subtle holo. This is one coat, and it had enough coverage. If I intended this mani to last I would still do two coats though, just for the extra wear.
I then stuck some crystal stars straight onto the wet polish. I got these ones from ebay, in a wheel with different sizes and shapes in it.
Here's another picture:
My nails are far too long at the moment. I keep waiting for one to break so I've got a reason to cut them down, but they seem to want to stay long right now! I will have to cut them soon though, because once they get to a certain length typing gets uncomfortable.
I'm sure now that the weather's turned cold they'll start to dry out a bit. I love this autumny weather, my woolly jumpers are already out, and I've broken out the hot chocolate too, yum! Hopefully I'll get a lovely crisp day soon to take a walk and get some lovely photos to share with you.
I hope you like my blingy offering! Don't forget to check out what the other lovelies came up with:
Catrine at Unnaked Nails (link)
Michelle at Labmuffin (link)
Maria at Maria's Nail Polish Blog (link)
Melanie at Nail and Polish (link)
Emily at An Accent Nail (link)
Ameerah at Valiantly Varnished (link)
Anna & Haylee at Makeup and Masala (link)
Rosemarie at Every Little Polish (link)
Anna at Makeup N More (link)
Until next time...
MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~
