Egyptian

Prompt: Egyptian

A quick and simple design, but it's kind of fun that way! Foil stamping on the middle nails means the gold is super mirror shiny.

Supplies: 

Essie Sunny Daze

Color Club New-tral

Zoya Caitlyn

Seche Astute

BMC Royal Blue

Moyra Foil Gel Polish Black

Gold foil

BM-S250

Chic Peek BM-XL476

Thermal with Stamping

 I love this thermal gel polish. I thought I'd try gel polish to see if it keeps its thermal-reactivity longer and so far so good! These photos don't show the stamping the greatest. I used foil stamping gel and gold foil, and it's so mirror-finish that it shows up with darker spots due to my camera!

 

Supplies:

Fairy Glo Gel Polish 5023

Moyra Foil Gel Polish Black

Gold Foil

Birdies

 Prompt: Birds/Feathers

Layered quite a few stamps to make these nails! I also had the slightly tricky task of reversing the bird image by stamping to a second stamper - took a few times to get it to transfer properly.

Supplies:

Sinful Colors Navy I Do

Born Pretty Galactic Center

Moyra Stamping Foil Gel Black

Gold Foil

Twinkled T Stamping Polish White

EJB-X01: Birds

Ejiubas + Sarah R2: Leaves

 

Day 3: Easter Chocolate

 Not sure if I'm entirely happy with how these turned out, but they at least look like chocolates to me! I originally thought about doing all of them as foil eggs, but decided to actually show some chocolate. For this day in particular dealing with my needy needy cats was a headache, so I'm glad I got anything done at all!

 The base chocolatey brown is Sally Hansen Cinnamon. I really like this brown! Starting with my thumb, I added some texture by pressing into the drying polish, and put in a touch of 'cream filling'  spilling out with light brown OPI Samoan Sand and white L'Oreal Hit the Slopes.

My index nail is a Cadbury creme egg! I pulled out the nail foils to do this one. I applied blue and red foil to half of the nail, then added a blobby shape in gold once those were dry. Using the dark blue China Glaze One Track Mind and a small brush, I wrote in the tiny Cadbury logo.

 My middle nail is a simple dipped design with Sally Hansen Cinnamon and OPI Samoan Sand. I really need to try doing dipped effects more often, I love the effect!

For my ring nail I tried a crosshatched textured effect by doing the 'spun sugar' technique with Samoan Sand and Hit the Slopes. It didn't turn out as well as I hoped, and it seemed like these two polishes didn't want to get to the perfect consistency to drag across my nail for the technique. Bah!

Lastly, for my pinky I added foil to just the tip to look like a half-unwrapped chocolate, then put some pink and yellow tiny pieces of crushed shell to the base as a topper. Finally I mattified all but the foil!

Colors Used:

Sally Hansen Cinnamon

OPI Samoan Sand

L'Oreal Hit the Slopes

China Glaze One Track Mind

Tiger Foils

 I think foil transfer is a ton of fun! I picked up this really cool foil of printed tiger fur with sparkly holographic white zones. This was a bit of an unplanned experiment of whatever sounded good at the time, but I like it!

 I put a base color of Wet n Wild Black Creme down, since I find it hard to get 100% coverage on foils without some creasing and black hides that really well with this pattern. And really, I didn't have as much trouble as I was expecting!

 For my ring accent nail, I thought I would experiment with foiling an oval metal stud. Trying to foil over just the metal did not work, so I painted over it with more black polish before applying the foil. That still looked a little bare, so I framed it in tiny metal beads. I then decided to go all-out and added some holographic silver diamond glitter and then applied more foil across the tip. Woo!

Colors Used:

Wet n Wild Black Creme

Tiger Nail Foil

Rainbow Waves

I really have started to enjoy messing around with nail foil. I've gotten better at working out the wrinkles, and now I think I've even found a combo that works so that the top coat doesn't wrinkle or cloud the shiny design.

 I just received a whole variety of awesome nail foil from Dollar Nail Art, and I really couldn't wait to use it! As soon as I opened the box, I started prepping for these nails.

 I decided to start first with this lovely bright silver holographic "wave" design. It proved frustratingly hard to capture the bright holographic flair in my lightbox, but keep scrolling for some bright colors at the end of this post!

Next, I decided to stamp a boxy design from Bundle Monster plate 322 using Wet n Wild Black Creme. I like that it breaks up the silver while still letting plenty of the holographic goodness show through. To compliment that design, I added matte black diamond glitter (also from Dollar Nail Art) to my thumb, middle, and pinkie nails.

Click to see photos taken outside!

Foil Fun!

 I happened upon a lovely foil kit in TJ Maxx the other day, and of course I had to get it! I was excited to get another bottle of foil glue, as mine is getting rather gloopy and I just hadn't gotten around to ordering more on Amazon. However, this kit had a hidden gem! In addition to lovely foils, and quite a large quantity of each color, this kit came with a topcoat that WORKS for foils!

 On my left hand I used the included topcoat as a protectant before adding a layer of Seche Vite. On my right hand I experimented with other products to see if I had anything that would not pull, wrinkle, or drag out the foil. On my pinkie I tried OPI Nail Strengthener, as I'd heard some people had success with non-topcoat products. No dice there, it really started to pull the color away.  On my ring nail I tried Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Clearly Quick to see if a thinner topcoat would sort of work. That was really disastrous, with tons of wrinkling! On the remaining nails, I sort of did okay with NYC Demon Glow, which is a UV Active topcoat. Still, those were nowhere near as smooth as the cheapo top coat nails on my left hand!

 These two photos really highlight the difference! The top photo, my left hand, has the cheap topcoat and significantly less wrinkling.

 Oh, and to accent the purty purty foil, I added some fun star glitter to my ring nails.

 Here's the bottle of generic-looking foil top coat. It has absolutely no smell, but is the consistency of regular nail polish. I checked the box, and it lists the ingredients as water, glycerin, cellulose gum, and a host of cosmetic preservatives. So now I'm totally tempted to experiment with mixing my own water-glycerin combos to see if I can recreate the results!

Day 8: Mirror Reflection

 This theme was the perfect chance to play with the super-chrome fun that is OPI Push and Shove! The one downside was that it showed where one nail was undergoing a tea bag repair, so I improvised with adding some holographic nail foil to obscure that!

 I started by using the included basecoat with the set, then added two coats of OPI Push and Shove. I then spent the next hour or so having too much fun admiring how reflective it was! I then added the holographic foil to my ring and thumb nails and spent way too much time watching it shift and shimmer.

 Because there's never enough sparkle in the world, I then added a little Sephora by OPI Beam Me Up, Hottie! as it is nearly as bright as the foil.

 Bonus shot of glitter and foil and shiny shiny nails!

Colors Used:

OPI Push and Shove

 Sephora by OPI Beam Me Up, Hottie!

Butterfly Fairy

 I had so much fun with this one! I had the idea of painting a fairy with some butterflies, and spent some time sketching concepts. This ended up being the one I liked the most, and I think it turned out really nicely!

 The base color is ORLY In the Navy, with a touch of Revlon Dreamer (a light blue) sponged over the top. Next, I pulled out my acrylic craft paint in white and 'golden brown'. I lightly roughed in the fairy on my ring nail with white craft paint first, then mixed a light skin tone color and gave her a little more detail. I then roughed out the shape of her wing on my middle finger first in craft paint, then filled it with foil glue. Then, I used some transfer foil to make it super sparkly blue!

 The remaining butterflies I painted with ORLY Sweet Peacock (blue) and ORLY What's The Password (orange). I added orange and blue details to the fairy's dress as well. Next, black details were added with a 0.25mm Micron pen, because cheating is fun! I used white acrylic paint for the white dotted details.

 Lastly, it's not all too apparent in these photos, but I added China Glaze Fairy Dust to the background on each nail for a little more sparkly holographic goodness. Lightly dotted throughout is also Sephora by OPI Meet Me At the Disco, which is also a holographic glitter in a slightly larger size.

Colors Used:

ORLY In the Navy

Revlon Dreamer

ORLY Sweet Peacock

ORLY What's The Password?

China Glaze Fairy Dust

Sephora by OPI Meet Me At the Disco

Acrylic paint: White and Light Brown

Black Micron Pen