sweethearts

With Valentine's Day right around the corner, with it comes another excuse for a manicure--no matter your opinion of the trivial Hallmark Holiday itself (bet you can't tell where I stand).

This look was supposed to be an exaggerated sort of french manicure where the tips essentially were hearts (it helps to have longer nails, particularly in a almond/round/pointed shape but not necessary).
With the Pepto-Bismol Pink and Cherry Red combo I hoped it would also give the design a bit of a retro feel.

To start I painted one coat of butter LONDON Horse Power Nail Fertilizer--the key to strong healthy nails! After I did one coat of butter LONDON Nail Foundation Flawless Basecoat. Once that dried, I painted two coats of butter's Fruit Machine. Using Ladybird, I painted a heart on the tip of each nail. Below is an easy tip for how to paint nice symmetrical hearts...

After all the hearts were painted I finished it off with a coat of Seche Vite Topcoat.
Hope you like these lovely retro nails! Oh, and Happy Valentine's Day! Hope someone treats you real sweet--whether that's your SO or you are lucky like me to boast multiple Valentines in the form of Dad, Sister, and BFFs! ;)

my oh maya

I came across Maya Hayuk's work one day wile aimlessly scrolling through Instagram...as we do...and was immediately in love with the colors, perfect symmetry of it all, and the drips--don't know if it was the juxtaposition of the dripping paint over the perfectly cut lines or that it was so perfectly imperfect in itself but I just love them. After spending some time creeping through all of Maya Hayuk's different commission and projects and obsessing over them for some time I decided I was inspired enough to try and replicate it on a smaller scale...my nails. 

http://mayahayuk.com/?page=murals&id=chem-trails-2013

L to R: Scoundrel, Royal Navy, Keks, Poole, Fiver, Jaded Jack, Cheers, Silly Billy, Fruit Machine, Primrose Hill Picnic 

I gathered up a handful of colors and set to work in the usual way--a coat of butter LONDON Horse P

ower Nail Fertilizer and a coat of Nail Foundation Flawless Basecoat. Next, I painted a coat of white lacquer using Cotton Buds so all the subsequent colors would show up nice and bright.

The actual process of painting the design is a bit difficult to systematically describe. I essentially picked my first color--say, the light purple, Scoundrel--and freehand painted either an X, a V, a  diagonal line, or nothing on the nail. I would then move on to another color and layer another one by the purple one, sometimes in the same shape, sometimes not. The more colors I added, the nail gradually filled up. I used Maya Hayuk's painting as a reference and I think the resulting effect was pretty similar. After I filled all the nails with the overlapping lines, I added some little drips on in select colors. I finished everything with one coat of SV Topcoat. 

Before adding the drips and finishing with the topcoat

I absolutely love how they turned out and apparently so did butter LONDON because they posted them on their Instagram a few days later!

 So what do you think of my mani and Maya Hayuk's work? Are you inspired? 

stone cold

I have done variations on this both in style (light granite nails using a sponge) and technique (both turquoise and autumn nails created using a saran wrap method), but this turned out to be one of my favorites. Since it was winter, I wanted to do a darker marble or granite nail effect. (Side note: how perfect is that little snowflake by my pinky finger in the above picture?!?!)

I began with a coat of butter LONDON Horse Power Nail Fertilizer and a coat of Nail Foundation Flawless Basecoat. Next, I painted my base layer in a light grey using the butter LONDON shade Billy No Mates. 

Once the base coat had dried, I bunched up a piece of saran wrap and selected my first accent lacquer, painting some of that shade on the saran wrap. After dabbing the saran wrap onto my workspace (a paper towel, paper plate, magazine or something should do fine) to get rid of the excess polish, i sponged a little onto the first nail. I repeated this process with each nail, adding different colors, dabbing in different places on the nail, and painting different spots on the saran wrap to create different textures on the nail. After that was complete I used a striping brush and butter LONDON's Union Jack Black black varnish to paint some veins on each nail. Then, using Marbs, a beautiful molten gold--I traced over top that black vein, leaving just an outline of black--giving the appearance of veins of gold in the marble. I sealed the look off with one coat of Seche Vite Topcoat.

I absolutely fell in love with effect. Like I said at the start of the post, same concept and techniques that I have used previously, but totally different results! 

Hope you like it! 

Billy No Mates     Chimney Sweep         Sloane Ranger            Cotton Buds              Union Jack Black              Marbs   

teardrops

Not much going on here--and perhaps pictures don't really do it justice-- but this quick and easy manicure was a favorite winter one of mine. I did this quick one day when I was in NYC. Always a fan of playing with negative space, I just wanted to create a sort of teardrop effect on the tip of the nail not quite to the nail bed. 

To start I painted one coat of butter LONDON Horse Power Nail Fertilizer. Next I added a coat of butter LONDON Nail Foundation Flawless Basecoat. Using my absolute favorite winter shade, La Moss, I painted the teardrop shape on each nail, doing about three coats. I painted a layer of SV topcoat over top of La Moss, leaving the nude part of the nail matte. 

Super simple, but more fun than just painting them a solid color. 

Thoughts?

cheer cheer

Wake up the echoes...football season means HERE COME THE IRISH. I understand some people don't like college football (though I'm not going to pretend to understand you), and even more so I understand most people either love or hate Notre Dame...usually its hate, but if you went to Notre Dame it's a whole different story. If you fit into either of the first two categories listed above you may want to skip this post all together because it's a little heavy on the blue and gold (just don't skip out on me all together yeah?). 

So I had the absolute pleasure of heading back to the bend to meet up with some college friends for the weekend to cheer on the Irish against UMass. Not a huge game all together but every game at Notre Dame Stadium is treated with the same enthusiasm and spectacle as the playoffs so it's always a good time--not to mention staying in a house just off campus with twenty-some alumni friends is never a bad thing. Naturally to be decked out head to toe for the Fighting Irish, a nail blogger would have to have some nails to compliment the look. I have done a few ND nails in the past [Here Comes the Irish & Gleams they Gold and Blue] so I wanted to do something different this time (ie. forgo the monogram and clover). I decided to revisit a technique I hadn't used in ages--splatter painting. 

An in-depth tutorial for the splatter painting technique I used can be found on the above link for my previous splatter painting post, but I will outline the basics below. 

I started with one coat of butter LONDON Horse Power Nail Fertilizer and followed that with one coat of butter LONDON Nail Foundation Flawless Basecoat. 

Next I painted my main coat of Royal Navy for a solid navy blue foundation. Next I poured a small amount of the three accent colors I chose, Big Smoke, The Full Monty, and West End Wonderland, onto a paper plate. 

              Royal Navy          Big Smoke           The Full Monty   West End Wonderland

Using a plastic straw, i dipped one end into a color so the polish created a film over the end of the straw and then positioned the end about an inch or two over my nail and blew through the straw. The resulting effect was a splatter of the polish onto my nail and unavoidably my fingers. I repeated this process on all the nails, varying the colors. It ended up creating a marbled sort of effect.

After I was satisfied with all the splatter painting, I painted a coat of SV topcoat and let it dry. Using a small makeup brush and nail polish remover, I cleaned up all the excess splatter.

Not my favorite look--personally I liked it better with the neon colors. It's a difficult technique because you don't have much control and being a bit of a perfectionist it can get frustrating if a nail turns out looking wonky--also a huge waste of polish! 

Anyway, I got what I wanted which was blue and gold nails for my Notre Dame game and they sure looked good from the 30 yard line when we absolutely crushed UMass! 

What do you think? Oh...and GO IRISH!!

Criss Cross & a Cuppa

Ahhh...well doesn't that look relaxing. A nice cuppa, a good book--swear it's not a prop (East of Eden-go read it!), and a fabulous but muted mani. Just what you need to keep those harsh winter days from getting you down. 

Since my nails have actually been in good form for once (knock on wood) I have really been gravitating toward designs that accentuate the almond shape and take advantage of the length. This particular design may be one of my favorite ones to date. The overall look is fairly simple and relative to some of my other designs it wasn't unnaturally time consuming to do, but it was perhaps a but more complex than it appears. 

I began the design like all my others with a coat of butter LONDON Horse Power Nail Fertilizer. Unlike all my other manicures, I did NOT apply a coat of Nail Foundation. Shocking I know. The reasoning for this was simply an aesthetic one. I prefer to use the foundation so the lacquer adheres and lays smoothly overtop and ultimately lasts longer. However I really wanted to have a true matte nude nail underneath and feared my heavy handedness with the foundation would absolutely butcher the look. So in lieu of the foundation I was free to start with the design straight away. The only varnish color I used for this design was butter LONDON's Cotton Buds. 

I began by essentially painting a french manicure on my nails. Instead of your standard French Manicure where you follow the curve of your nail however, I created a sharp V starting at the mid point on each side of the nail and meeting in the middle about where the tip started then filled in the white tip. 

After the tips had dried, I used a slim brush to paint two lines extending down from each edge of the V creating a criss-crossing diamond pattern. I did this on each nail and went over everything with one more coat of white. After that dried. I carefully repainted all the white with Essie's Matte About You matte topcoat--leaving all the natural parts of my nail untouched. I absolutely love playing around with negative space and this design truly took advantage of that leaving little diamonds untouched by basecoat, polish, or topcoat.

The overall look was one of my favorite designs to date. Chic, simple and clean. I loved how the matte white looked and the french criss-cross manicure complimented my nail shape quite nice. 

What do you think?