#33DC Day 2 - Most Used Colour

Teal and pink, how I love you. These two specific colours should be familiar to you if you follow my blog. They are GOSH Miss Minty and Sally Hansen Coral Reef. It is very sad but I'm running pretty low on both of these. I'll have to go buy more so I can continue to use them all the time.

MCC Day 3 - Presents

Kelly at devilishdesigns is running a Christmas Challenge, and Day 3 is Presents.

So I just finished applying to the last of my grad schools. I just need to mail out a package with my physical application to the one school that wants physical copies and I'm done. I'm pretty behind in the challenge, what with the last minute rush of my applications, and the plus side to running late is that I got to see Kelly's design for this day before I had painted mine yet. I adore what she did, you should go check it out. Her presents really inspired mine.

 I went with a bow colour that was the same as the background colour on the nail before so I could get a wide range of colours with a bit of order to them as well.

I traced the outlines of the bow with a black striper, but went with a broken, sketched line rather than a careful traced line, I like the movement it gives things, and I don't wrap my presents too neatly, so why should I paint them that way?

There are a lot of colours used here, I'll list them all for you here:
Black: Kiss Black Striper
Yellow: Sally Hansen Lite
Blue: Sally Hansen Blu
Green: Wet 'n Wild SaGreena The Teenage Witch
Purple: Sally Hansen Cyber
Red: Sally Hansen Rapid Red and Cult Nails Charlatan over top for the background. (Rapid Red is the only red I own. Shocker, right? So since I wanted something shimmery I made it myself. Charlatan made things a bit more pink but I'm fine with what I ended up with.)

This day in the challenge has really gotten me psyched for Christmas! Are you excited?

MCC Day 2 - Candycanes

Kelly at devilishdesigns is running a Christmas Challenge, and this is Day 2..

Candycanes!

Here is a closer shot for you. I like this, its pretty simple but I keep glancing down and smiling, I don't know.

I did this freehand. I considered taping but thinking about all that time waiting for everything to be 100% dry just made me want to pull out my hair, so I took a walk on the wild side. What can I say, I'm just crazy like that.

Right below this is my right hand, you can see that the lines are a little thicker and slightly more woobly, but good try left hand, good try. You didn't embarrass us or anything at least.

Back to my left hand though.

As for the polish I used, the white is Heaven White by Misa, and the pink/red is Sally Hansen's Hi-Res. The green is Sally Hansen's Hi-Def from the same HD set. Over top of it all I used Claire's glow in the dark nail polish, which is a surprise hit for me. I originally bought it just because, well, it was glow in the dark and that was awesome, but it has some great, subtle glitter in it and every time I see my nails glowing it really just tickles me, so I've grown to adore the stuff.

Shew, so that was a lot of pictures, but I had fun with this and the increasingly rare sun was out and shining when I wanted to take my pictures so I indulged. See you for the next day in this challenge!

Anniversary Nails

I did this nail design on Wednesday since my boyfriend and I had our 6th year anniversary then. I was just feeling in the mood for something hearts and sweetness so here it is.

I used Essie Fiji for the light pink background and Sally Hansen Hot Magenta for the gradient and the hearts. The hearts were free-handed over top of the gradient, followed by a coat of Claires Glow in the Dark polish over that for a bit of glitter in the light and to make the light pink glow in the dark, because how fun is that?

Wish I could have gotten a good photo of the glow in the dark effect for you all, but it wasn't working out for me. Still, I'm pretty happy with what I ended up with.

I used two coats of Seche Vite for my top coat to smooth out the roughness of the glitter, and I recently found some 100% acetone at Wal-Mart so I got to touch up my polish without trying to use my regular remover to do it.

What do you think of this design? I'd love to hear from you!

Magnetic Polish

I'm totally starting to understand why swatches are awesome. Whenever I get a new polish I just really want to show it to you all! Well, here I am doing that, this time with a magnetic polish.

Magnetic polish is incredibly neat, I just love the whole concept of it. So the fact that I've only gotten my hands on one this past week is practically criminal! Yes, criminal. Anyways, I also don't have enough green, so that was how I justified buying Sally Hansen Electric Emerald for myself.

I wasn't at all disappointed with my purchase, application was easy and the magnet worked really well and quickly. It was a little short though, especially on my thumb and ring fingers, which seem to be longer than my other nails. I don't really know what to do about that, so I just let the magnet be too short after failing at shifting it forward in any way a couple times.

The waves look like they are moving when you move your hand in my opinion, above and below are a couple pictures that almost get that across. If you haven't tried magnetic polish I highly recommend it, tons of fun.

Thanks for looking!

Purple and Gold Jelly Sandwich

I like this one. It was a lot of fun. I wanted to try doing a jelly sandwich but I didn't have any really interesting glitters. Guess I need, that's right, need, to buy more! But either way what I ended up with is pretty neat.

I used GOSH Gasoline for my purple because it is pretty sheer, I did a couple coats of it on all but my accent nail first. Then I used Misa Disco Queen for the gold which I put on every nail, but lightly on the purple ones.

I did another layer of Gasoline over the gold very lightly so you could still see the gold underneath, and on my accent nail I did a coat of Sally Hansen Big Money over the accent nail.

This is what it looked like then, and I felt like it wasn't quite right yet. Also, whoa pointer finger, why must you be so woobly? I filed away and re-did the shaping on my nails once I saw how strange it looked from this mani in some of the photos.

I did a band of gold again on each nail to give it a little something extra and to give a little continuity to the design.

And here I go with Abraxas again, showing off nails and snake at the same time. He's just so pretty!
What do you think of this design? Can it still count as a jelly sandwich?

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.

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

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

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!