Hi there!
Hope you're having a great start to your weekend. Today should have been my first lie in for 12 days, so typically I woke up at 6.20am and couldn't get back to sleep! I lay there with my eyes open for about half an hour, and eventually gave up and decided to get up. And of course I've spent those extra hours productively, by painting my nails.
Ever since I did the L'Oreal Masquintense review (link here) I haven't been able to get the orange and white packaging out of my head. So I've known what colours todays manicure was going to be all week. I wasn't sure whether to do dots, stripes, or stamping though. As my last couple of nail art posts have been stripes, and I wasn't really feeling dots today, I decided to go with stamping. I picked a swirly image from Cheeky plate B, which I bought from Amazon, here's the link if you want to buy it, it's priced at £6.99. The images stamp well, and it's good that there are 42 images on the plate, but I'm not sure I'd use all of them. However I'm using one today!
For my white base, I wasn't sure whether to use OPI's Alpine Snow, or OPI's My Boyfriend Scales Walls. I did a comparison on the two here but in the end I decided to go for My Boyfriend Scales Walls due to its better formula. This means that I'll probably end up never using Alpine Snow as a base coat again, but it does come in handy for dotting etc.
Then I got out my oranges to see which ones stamped best. In the end it was a toss up between two. Essies Orange It's Obvious, which you can see here and Color Clubs Wham Pow. The Color Club is more neon though, so it won.
And here's what I ended up with:
It's not perfect, but I like it! It's actually more neon than it shows in this pic, but still wearable. Nice and jolly, which is always a good thing.
Here's another pic, closer up this time:
As you can see, I smudged the middle finger, and took a chunk out of my base coat at the cuticle on the same finger. I also missed a spot on my little finger, but, hey, you get the idea! I'll stop picking holes in my manicure now haha.
And here's how it looks to the outside world, seeing as I obviously don't go around holding a bottle of polish in my hand all the time (actually, I'm not sure that's really true...):
I like it because to me it looks like water marbling, without any of the mess. I love how marbling looks, but I just can't bring myself to dunk my whole finger in a sheet of suspended polish and then spend time cleaning it back off again.
I like this stamping design more than I thought I would. I have a feeling you'll be seeing it a few times this summer, in different colours, and maybe gradients too. Hopefully a bit more tidily done than this one!
Until next time...
MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~
Artsy Wednesday once more! These days whizz around I can tell you. This weeks offering is the product of one of those happy occasions where you just throw something together out of neccessity and it actually comes out okay. Nice one!
As quite often happens with me, it was after 9pm on Tuesday night when I started thinking about doing these nails. As I work all day through the week, I have to prepare my posts beforehand, so this really is the last chance saloon. I have of course been trying to think up designs for a couple of days, but it turns out that white is quite difficult to think of designs for.
I went through all the thoughts of glitter accent nails, or crystals/glequins, but nothing really made me think, ooh yes I'd like to try that. So I just went upstairs to my polishes, grabbed the obvious white, OPI's Alpine Snow, and thought, what colour do I really like with white? And as it happens only one colour came to mind, and that's orange. Now, I have done an orange and white manicure on the blog before, (here's the link) but that was stamping, and that means waiting for the base to dry, and no time for that today, not even with Seche!
So here's what I came up with:
One of the brightest oranges I own is Essie's Orange It's Obvious, which I swatched and reviewed in full (here) so I thought I'd go with that. A good nailart technique to use if you're in a rush is dotting, because you don't have to wait for the base colour to dry fully before you get on with the art. I decided to make random flowers instead of plain dots, just because I wouldn't have to take so much care (and therefore time) over it, and actually, I like the results!
Here's another pic with the bottle getting a look-in:
As you can see, the Essie dries a shade or so darker on the nail than it shows in the bottle. I used one quite thin coat, and then one thickish one because I was in a rush (as I think I've mentioned haha).
And I might as well put in the last picture, seeing as I took the time to edit it:
Back to indoor photos now, as there's no light left in the sky when I get home from work. But to be honest, I didn't really take that much advantage of it even when there was. So many more fun things to do when the sun's out, like sunbathing and reading a book in the garden. I actually enjoy my polishes more in the winter, when I'm indoors and sitting still long enough to let them dry properly.
Why not take a look at what whiteys the rest of the Artsy Wednesday crew have come 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)
All in all, I like this, and I think I'll definitely have a go at it in some other colours. What's your go-to "in a rush" nailart technique?
Until next time...
MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~
