Neon, whoa!

Neons! So here I am testing out my spiffy new neons. It's so bright and wonderful and I'm really happy with it. I sponged this on and didn't use vaseline or anything around my nails so it was a big pain to get all the excess off. I used a white base to ensure the colours got to be as bright as they could so I don't know how well this covers, next time I use it I'll try it without.

If I did this again I would use purple and blue on the outsides because the blend between purple and blue isn't as smooth as I'd like and those two colours are the darkest.
I'd do this blend next time:
purple/pink, pink/orange, orange/yellow, yellow/green, green/blue

For anyone taking a peek backwards, you'll notice I've added a couple more pictures.

I was glancing through my photos and found some really lovely ones. I thought to myself, why did I only post one image for this design? There wasn't a good reason so more pictures for all I say!

For reference, here are the colours again, from Color Club.
Pink: Electro Candy
Purple: Ultra Violet
Blue: Pure Energy
Green: What a Shock!
Yellow: Volt of Light
Orange: Tangerine Scream
Top Coat: Vivid Top Coat

First Online Haul

Here is my first ever internet nail polish haul! I was so excited I opened it at the bus stop back from the post office! Yay! Peanuts! I got this from Nail Polish Canada and they were really very quick. I ordered this on the 18th and it got here yesterday, the 23rd, which included a weekend.

Here is the neon set I bought from Color Club. It was the Electro Candy set. The colours are really nice and it comes with a colour enhancing top coat which is neat.
Left to right here are the names: Electro Candy, Ultra Violet, Pure Energy, What a Shock!, Volt of Light, Tangerine Scream, Vivid Top Coat

Click to see more

I just watch the bees...

Oh Supernatural, you are such a wonderful, marvelous show. I will re-watch and adore you long after you end and I'm counting the seconds until season 8 when I can see you again.

I'm a bit of a Supernatural fan girl, and in order to redirect my frantic need to buy anything with a quote from the show on it in some messed up desire to prove my love for it I've painted my nails with a favourite quote from Castiel.

I really do enjoy this one, although I could stand to redo it all again in order to try and straighten up the text on my thumb and even out the dashes of my bee trail. Mr. Bee himself I adore, so cute. The tips were free-handed and I'm fairly proud of that. My yellow is Sally Hansen's Lightening and it is in need of a bit of thinner, which is in the mail as I type. The gold is Misa's Disco Queen again, any excuse to use it, honestly.

The bee and the black is acrylic done with some tiny little brushes I bought, I'll post more about that later.

Subtle Gradient

Here I am revisiting the glitter gradient design, this time with a much more subtle pink shimmer called 086 Rose, and a silver glitter aptly if boringly called 555 Silver, both from Gosh. Despite their uninspiring names I adore both of these, application, colour, shine, everything. I like how subtle this gradient turned out. It also lasted quite a while, there's a slight chip on my middle finger there, when I noticed it I realized I had had this on for most of the work week without taking a picture.

My ring finger nail looks way longer than my other nails.. wow.. ehehehe.. it doesn't look like that looking at them now.

Anyways, I have a secret for you, but you can't tell. I did this right after the other gradient, I just didn't want to post two in a row. I'm messing with time! Mwahaha!

Enjoy, as always, and thanks for watching.

Gold!

This is just a short post to show off Misa's Disco Queen. I love how shimmery and sparkly this polish is. I kept getting distracted and waving my fingers around to see it go.

There is so much sparkle in this polish that you don't need a base coat, I used three coats here and it was opaque in two. Went on perfect, dried quickly, not too gritty, I only needed one coat of my top coat to smooth it out. I used Essie's good to go top coat here.

Tape Troubles and a Dot Design

This began with wanting to test out some beautiful new polish I got for my birthday. The two colours are both from Gosh, the mint is called 597 Miss Minty and the other is 540 Ocean. I'd first attempted to do something fun with taping but it went oh so horribly. I guess I hadn't waited long enough, despite leaving it for another hour every time it still pulled up all the polish below and let me just say now, never again shall I try to tape without sleeping or going about my day first to be sure it really is dry. Look at all the tape I cut into tiny little strips! Grawr!

Individually cut cause I'm crazy

So after metaphorically ripping out my hair for a few hours I gave it up as a bad job and turned to Pixel's Polish for a tutorial I had read while watching polish dry. Thank you for saving my sanity and for this absolutely adorable design idea.

It was quite simple to do and got a lot of compliments. I chose to only dot out one of the sides with stylized drips in mind and I'm pretty happy with how that turned out. I also really like these colours together, although maybe the thickness of Miss Minty is to blame for my taping troubles I forgive it since it's quite pretty, and the shimmer on Ocean is beautiful, this picture doesn't do it justice.

Gradient Glitter and an Art Project

I'm a big big fan of this one. Really I am. I was inspired by cutepolish, I adore her work. I went for a brighter pink and a chunkier gold not to make any particular statement, I just love the two polishes I used and was excited to put them together.

I used Sally Hansen Hot Magenta and Misa Disco Queen for this. It was my first time doing a glitter gradient and my first time using Disco Queen and everything went absolutely perfectly. I kept this for as long as I could which was easy because I could touch up chips with the gold without it being noticeable if I went over it all again with a top coat.

Pay no attention to the stuff on my floor in the background, ehehe..

I also used this manicure in an art project, take a look!

Did you spot my second hand yet? I did the painting, arrangement and polish for this and it was a ton of fun, I loved integrating my nail art into my painting and art photography.

rar!

Do you like seeing art I've done that relates to or involves nail art, even if it isn't on my nails? Let me know!
Hope you enjoyed this one, I loved doing it.


Copyright 2012 © Alexandra Tremblay
All Rights Reserved

Dune Nail Art

I've decided to join in on the 52 week challenge incredibly late, XD hah it's week 42 oh gosh I hope it loops back! But I couldn't resist because week 42 is Inspired by a Book! and as soon as I saw it I knew I had to do Dune.

Look at my beautiful scrunchie! No, you should look at the nail art. For those who haven't read Dune this is the landscape of the planet Arrakis, which is a desert planet and the home of the critter on my ring finger, a Shai-Hulud or sandworm. The sandworm is an absoltively huge creature and I hope that is clear with the help of the sand dunes in the background.

There he is!

If you have read Dune lemme know! I love the books and I just watched the miniseries with my boyfriend last week so I've had it on the brain and I'm planning to re-read it, maybe once I finish this post.

This is a lot of firsts for me, this was my first manicure done with acrylic paint, both because I wanted to try it and because I just don't own that many yellow/orange/brown sand colours. It was also the first time I've done the accent ring and thumb, until now I've done all my nails the same and I really really like it this way, so I'll do a lot more of that. It's also the first time I've done a scene and it was so, so fun.

Oh, also, I've seen in others posts for the 52 week challenge that they include others who are participating, so if anyone could tell me where that list is or how to do it I'd be much obliged.

Thanks for looking!

Warm and Cool Stripes

I've got another mani from the past for you today along with a quick post. I did this as a warm hand and a cool hand, and I was really happy with it. But gosh I'm glad I have a proper camera for all the posts after this. 

I used a red, orange and yellow for the left hand and a blue purple and pink for the cool hand and covered it all in a coat of Clear Cut Diamond from Maybelline.

Hope you like it!

Colours
On the left:  

Rapid Red - Sally Hansen's Insta-Dri  
Copper Chrome - Revlon's Top Speed Chrome  
Lightening - Sally Hansen's Insta-Dri 

On the right:

Petal Chrome - Revlon's Top Speed Chrome Purple Potion - Sally Hansen's Xtreme Wear Hot Magenta - Sally Hansen's Xtreme Wear

My Blog Title Explained

Alla Prima is an Italian phrase meaning "first time". The term is used for when one paints directly in one session with no under-drawing or painting. It usually refers to oil or acrylic painting.

Ela is me, Elaret, aha and it sounds like Alla.. get it? Oh aren't I clever. Anyway, I like the term and the implications for how I go about doing my nails, polish first and lots of nail polish remover when things don't turn out the way I thought they might. Also, it sounds pretty neat if I do say so myself.

Thanks for reading!

First Post! Oh, I mean TMNT Nails

Oh my, a nail polish blog all my own? These are exciting times, internet. Exciting. Times.

I wanted to get this, my first post, out today because tomorrow seems like such an inauspicious time to make a first post. I've got a backlog of photos of my nails that I'll start off showing you, I've been keeping them on flickr, tumblr and whatnot but I feel it's blog time. I enjoy so many people's nail polish blogs, hopefully someone will enjoy mine too. Actually, someone already has, me!

Alrighty, picture time, and don't worry, I have a better camera now, low quality won't last forever.

I used Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Xtreme Wear for the base colour and masks, and Sally Hansen nail art pen in black and white for the eyes.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle nails! So fun to do, posting this makes me want to redo it since this has to be at least a year old.
Also, great timing for this post, since just yesterday while browsing I found Nail-Art-101.com's tutorial on how to do this. I loved her blog even more for seeing this there.

I hope you all enjoyed my very first post!