31 Day Challenge: Day 31 (Re-create Your Favourite Challenge)

WOW, last day of the challenge! Can''t believe I actually managed to finish the challenge although I took a total of 76 days.

For this last challenge, I had to re0create my favourite look and I really liked Day 15: Delicate Print. I really liked the lacey look and wanted to try another similar look, this time with konad.

The inspiration for this manicure came from here and mine is so much messier but I couldn't wait to finish the challenge so I didn't restamp my nails even though some of the lines were blurry.

First, I painted Essie Jazz then stamped on a fishnet design using konad plate m57.



Totally hating myself for not doing a better job on my index finger and pinkie.

Next, I stamped on what I call the "toilet paper" design using konad plat m71.



There you go, lacey nails in a snap. So much faster than the crazily intricate lace design I drew on my nail wheel for Day 15!

Polish used:
- Essie Jazz
- Elianto Twilight

YESYESYES! I'M FINALLY DONE WITH THIS 31 DAY CHALLENGE! I'm so happy and not to mention tired from painting my nails almost every night. I'm totally going on a one week break after I post the next entry I have lined up, as a promise to a friend!

31 Day Challenge: Day 30 (Inspired By a Tutorial)

This design was inspired by two tutorials actually, and not one.The first one was for the angry birds and the second was for the green pig!




So yes, for today, I'll be showing you my Angry Birds design!



I spent an ENTIRE afternoon doing this design but it was really worth it! Just looking at it makes me smile!

Polish used:
China Glaze Hey Sailor
China Glaze Flyin' High
China Glaze Happy Go Lucky
Elianto White
Essie Playa Del Platinum
Elianto Twilight
Cumulonimbus (my own franken)
China Glaze Four Leaf Clover
Black, white, yellow, red and green acrylic paint

WOKAY, I'm finally left with one more challenge to go! Now I've got to think about which challenge was my favourite one and I have go to recreate it!

31 Day Challenge: Day 29 (Inspired By the Supernatural)

The first thing that came to mind was to use all the Halloween themed images on my Bundle Monster plates for this challenge but it would be highly unoriginal because that was what most people did.

So I went googling around and I saw this! Gosh, all my friends know I'm in love with the Supernatural TV series! I've been faithfully watching it since 2006 I think and I love the Winchester boys so much! The plot has gotten a little lame over the years, with the whole apocalypse thing and now the leviathans and I really miss the good old days where they used to hunt different demons every episode.

The inspiration was season 7's title card with the smashed up mirror:



And this is what I came up with:



I painted a navy base with TFS BL604 and stamped on a broken glass image from the Bundle Monster BM 208 plate using China Glaze Millennium. I had some difficulties when I did my pinkie and the image didn't transfer properly the three times I tried so upon the third try, with fragments stamped on, I resorted to painting on the remaining line, which explains why some lines are thicker than others.

Look like I have to practice stamping more!

31 Day Challenge: Day 28 (Inspired By a Flag)

Since I was a teenager, I've had this strange attraction to the Union Jack so obviously I was pretty stoked to paint it for this challenge. Weirdly, I've never done a Union Jack manicure so this is my virgin Union Jack nails!

I chose to do a deep blue base with OPI Dating a Royal.



Dating a Royal is slighter darker and more purple than this. It was quite a difficult colour to photograph. Dating a Royal has a jelly finish and it really is a very pretty colour. It does give off a certain royal feel. Very British!



I decided to do an accent nail because doing Union Jacks on all my nails would be overkill and I like it! I used Daiso's nail art polish in white and red.

On to Supernatural nails for the next challenge! From what I envision, it will be very Halloween-esque. See you then!

31 Day Challenge: Day 27 (Inspired By Artwork)

I initially wanted to use Van Gogh's The Starry Night but quite a few bloggers have used it for this challenge so I browsed through Van Gogh's other paintings and I chose Vincent's Bedroon in Arles for my inspiration.



Instead of trying to paint the entire painting on my nails, what I did was to choose 5 elements of the painting and paint them on each nail.



On my thumb, I picked out the chair in the lower left corner. For my index, it was the green towel hanging in the wall. the window in the middle of the painting's on my middle finger. As for my ring finger, I chose the painting hanging on the wall and lastly, the bed is on my pinkie.

I'm not wearing a top coat because I wanted my nails to look like it was really painted with all the textures and an uneven finish. Sadly, I do think my effort ended up looking very juvenile, especially the bed on my pinkie due to the lack of shading but I was really tired and the lighting in my living room isn't as good as painting my nails under my table lamp in my room!

Polish used:
Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau
China Glaze First Mate
China Glaze Lemon Fizz
Cult Nails Awakening
Green, black, red, yellow and blue acrylic paint

Alrighties, inspired by a flag is up next and I'm pretty excited to do that challenge because I've always wanted to do union jack nails but have never gotten down to doing it. See you tomorrow then!

31 Day Challenge: Day 26 (Inspired By a Pattern)

I showed you guys a Japanese Waves design a did a couple of months back that was inspired by my guitar pick. Ever since then, I've wanted to try another Japanese Waves pattern but didn't know how to go about doing it because I didn't have a particular inspiration. Then, while I was a OCBC, I noticed they had a lovely debit card design that's called "Surf's Up" and the bank actually has these post card sized designs that you can take home so I took one home and that was my inspiration for this design.



Here's the post card I brought home and below's my take on the waves design (on the left).



I like how it came out but somehow it looks too cluttered. :( And as you can see, I also redid my original Japanese Waves design on my nail wheel!

Polish used:
Essie Jazz
OPI Dating a Royal
Blue, white and black acrylic paint

Next challenge is Inspired By an Artwork. I'm deciding if I should be brave and attempt to recreate Van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhone or be a chicken and find something easier!

31 Day Challenge: Day 25 (Inspired By Fashion)

Last year, when Miu Miu released their swallow print shoes and dresses, I WENT NUTS! Personally, I really really love swallows. I have swallow necklaces, rings, bracelets, notebooks, pens, anything you name, I probably have it or have thought about buying it.

So when I saw "inspired by a fashion", I immediately thought of SWALLOW PRINT!



I stayed true to the Miu Miu colour scheme and chose to do the design in pink and black.I think I drew a couple of swallows too fat though, and some of them look like dophins with wings, instead of swallows but overall I'm actually quite happy with the design!

31 Day Challenge: Day 24 (Inspired By a Book)

This was the inspiration / book I chose for today's challenge:



I bought this book a few years back mainly because I had some cash vouchers that were going to expire and this was the best book I could find. I thought it was a pleasant read and it sure was a tearjerker. In fact, I cried everytime Gerry wrote a letter to Holly. Sadly, the movie didn't live up to the book and as much as I loved the casting of Gerard Butler and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in it, I somehow felt Hilary Swank was a weird choice for Holly. Maybe it's just me.

On to the design I chose for my nails:



I used Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau as the light blue base and white acylic paint for the polka dots. For the accent finger, I chose to do a pink bow by mixing a tiny bit of red into the white acrylic paint I used for the polka dots.



My book had a different cover from the one I used as my inspiration but I took a picture with it anyways!
That's all for today's challenge, see you tomorrow for the Fashion challenge!

31 Day Challenge: Day 23 (Inspired By a Movie)

I know I'm late to the party but I just caught Bee Movie and it was really cute! Honestly, it made me feel guilty for eating honey and now I can't grab for or even look at the honey jar without feeling bad.
That said, I did a bee manicure that I've seen so many other people do before but alot of them did it against a blue background so it looks like the bee's flying in the sky. I chose a yellow background instead, because, well, I wanted to stay true to the bee theme, so it's yellow and black all the way. I did use two tiny drops of white for the bee's wings but that shouldn't count! HAHA! So I hope this will still be interesting!

I stayed up to do this manicure till 3am so forgive me if the trail lines aren't as crisp as they can be. Yes, I'm developing a bad habit of painting my nails in the wee hours of the night while watching tv. Oh, two guilty pleasures combined!
While doing my Inspired By a Colour manicure, I was watching Gene Simmons Family Jewels. THE WHOLE TIME. The Bio Channel was having a family Jewels marathon and it was just SOOOOOO amusing to watch! HAHA! And this manicure was done while watching Supernatural reruns and The Next Iron Chef: Superchefs on The Food Network! I've been prohibited to paint my nails in my room at night because I'd stink the whole room up and with the aircon, the fumes will just circulate round and round. So I shifted my operations to the living room with cable tv! :D
Gonna try to finish this 31 Day Challenge before school starts so I can take a shorter time to paint my nails once the projects start pouring in!

31 Day Challenge: Day 22 (Inspired By a Song)

I chose OutKast's Hey Ya! for today's manicure but I was more inspired by the music video than the song because of all the bright colours! More specifically, I was drawn to the clothes worn in the video and this was what I ended up with:

Let's go into some close ups shall we?

The black suit and red shirt on my thumb was inspired by the manager's outfit. I love how the lapel of his blazer has matte trimmings so I drew on a matte lapel on my thumb too, using Essie Matte About You.

I didn't dare attempt the ruffles on his shirt so I just left the shirt a plain red!

This green shirt and blue and green plaid pants combination is so cute on the singer! Love the colours together!

I think my plaid design was a a bit of a failure compared to others I've seen before but it's good enough for me.

The keyboardist was wearing a white shirt, green cardigan and an orange with blue stripes tie. Really like how the tie makes the outfit pop!

Sadly, when I painted the white polish on top of the green, they kinda mixed and I ended up with a cream colour instead of white. D:

The guitarist's outfit was the easiest of the bunch.

Just a green shirt, yellow and orange tie, and brown suspenders.

Okay, the drummer wore nothing but the crown so that's the only thing I could paint on my nail, unless you want me to paint his pacs! HAHA!

Not sure if you noticed but all the band members are portrayed by the same guy! LOL!
Hope you guys like this manicure! (:

31 Day Challenge: Day 21 (Inspired by a Colour)

INSPIRED BY A COLOUR? Gosh, how vague. Initially, I wanted to do an ombre manicure but after yesterday's failed attempt at water marbling, I just couldn't move on without giving it another go. This time, I tried dry water marbling and the only difference is that I dipped a piece of plastic into the water instead, then after the polish dried, I transfered it onto my nails. I'll explain how to go about doing this in a bit but pictures first!



Much prettier don't you think? It's much easier to be able to take your time to choose the best part of the design to transfer on your nail then to rush to dip your finger into water.

Okay, so here's how to do dry water marbling:

1. Get a cup of room temperature water. Also, you'll want to use a disposable cup or a cup that you no longer want to drink from. While waiting for the water to adjust to room temperature, you can go ahead and choose the colours you want to use. I chose Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau, Orly Snowcone and china Glaze First Mate. These are all pretty opaque polishes and using cremes instead of jelly finishes will help get the colour of the polish to come out more. Also you might want to work on some waterproof surface just in case, or on top of newspapers so you won't damage your table top. I chose to work on a plastic file!



It's very important for the water to be of room temperature so I suggest you leave the cup in the room for at least fifteen minutes before doing anything else. If the water is too cold or too hot, the polish just won't spread out and will end up looking like this.



2. Now you can proceed to drop polish into the middle of the cup so they spread out in concentric circles. Do unscrew the caps of each polish before starting the dropping process. The polish will dry pretty quickly so you want to work fast. I also like placing my bottles behind the cup like so, to make the dropping process smoother for me.



After you've dropped enough polish, you can proceed to swirl the design you want. Try to anchor the polish before swirling. To do so, simply use a toothpick and drag the outermost circle to the rim of the cup.



I anchored it to about 10 points. Doing so will ensure the polish won't move about in the cup while you create your design.



Also, when swirling your design, try not the start swirling from the outermost circle. I started from the second outermost circle. You can create any design you want but what I did was to drag the polish from outside circle into the middle, creating a flower and then from the middle of each retal, I dragged the polish outwards, and I ended up with this design:



These three articles contain a lot of useful tips and tricks for wet water marbling as well as the creation of the swirls so you might want to read them!

3. Now comes the fun part! After you've swirled the design, dip a small piece of plastic into the cup at an angle. You want to use a ziplock bag and cut it into small pieces. I tried using the plastic wrapper for wrapping books and that didn't work out well. This one shown below was prepared beforehand (wow, that sounded like some cooking show line) because by the time I took pictures of the swirling and final water marble design above, the polish had dried and could not be transferred.



You want to wait for the polish to dry before transferring it onto your nail. I waited a couple of hours.

4. The best part about dry water marbling is that you can choose which is the nicest part of the design to transfer onto your nail. Also, because you can cut out smaller pieces of plastic from the original piece, you can get a couple of nail's worth of transfer pieces from one water marble, compared your how I'd normally dip one finger into one water marble som this saves polish too!

To transfer, cut out the desired area you wish to transfer. I painted my nails with one coat of Take Me To Your Chateau before transferring so the colours of the marbling will pop more. Only stick the plastic onto the nail when the polish is tacky and not wet. This is crucial for the polish to transfer properly. How I determine if the polish is just right is that it feels dry to a light touch but you can still leave fingerprints if you press a little harder. It's hard to explain so you really have to experiment abit to get the right feel. I didn't take any pictures for this step but you can refer to this article for more information.

After pressing the plastic onto the nail firmly, what I did was to use a toothpick and dragged in along my cuticle lines until I saw the polish "break". This might hurt a little but it's worth it then at least I know that there'll be a clean rip from the plastic! Now, you need to trust me when I say you need to rip the plastic off your nail like how you'd wax your legs.

After that, wait for the marble to settle in and dry a little before painting on a later of top coat to seal everything in.

AND THAT'S IT!

I like dry marbling much better than wet marbling. Much neater and you can take your time to get it perfect!

31 Day Challenge: Day 20 (Water Marbled)

Gosh, this challenge was really hard! I tried doing it and I failed miserably so I took off all the polish on my nails and had to redo them. During my second attmept, I got lazy and I didn't paint a base colour on my nails before dipping them into the water which is why the colours on my nails are so sheer and there's VNL.

Goodness, there were so many air bubbles below the paint and it looks really ugly close up! :(
I chose a red and green combo because this was the manicure I wore for Christmas. And if you noticed, I'm showing you my right hand, which explains the very awkward pose and this is because I couldn't bare to clean off my Galaxy Nails design. Yes, I had my Galaxy Nails on my left hand and this Water Marbled design on my right hand at the same time!
I think I'm never going to do water marbling again. As fun as it was to swirl out the designs in the water, the whole dipping process was just painfully messy and the water bubbles just ruined the whole experience for me! Plus for every nail, I had to use quite a bit of polish so it's not the most economical manicure.  Maybe I'll try dry water marbling some other time! Hopefully that'll be easier.
Wheeee! Ten more challenges to go!

31 Day Challenge: Day 19 (Galaxies)

I did a galaxy manicure a while back which was inspired by a cutepolish tutorial and I wanted to do a different look this time round so I googled some nebula / galaxy pictures.

Here's an overall picture of all five nails!



And now we have close ups.



I did a swirly design for my thumb.





The design on my index finger was inspired by this picture of the Starburst Galaxy M82.





The design on my middle finger was inspired by the Galaxy M81.





The design on my ring finger was inspired by the really pretty Rosette Nebula. It really looks like a rose if you look at it!





And this last pinkie nail was inspired by a Galaxy Cluster. You can't really see but I did use a purple polish (Siberian Nights) and it's pretty dark so perhaps that's why it isn't obvious and just looks black where it's supposed to be purple.

Hope you girls like this manicure better than the first one! (:

31 Day Challenge: Day 18 (Half Moon)

I haven't had the best luck with half moon nails, especially with those pesky reinforcement rings. Somehow they always end up smearing the polish but this time, I somehow managed to paint on the half moons quite cleanly. Plus, I found a little cheat code: paint over the half moon lines with a glitter polish!



I used one coat of China Glaze Seashell, wait for that to dry and then I stuck reinforcement rings before painting on a coat of OPI My Private Jet. After everything dried, I used my stripping brush to paint on Couleur Inc Lupi over the half moon lines.

I finally have pretty half moon nails!

31 Day Challenge: Day 17 (Glitter)

Merry Christmas everyone! Couldn't resist posting this picture of my Eeyore plushie wishing everyone a Merry Christmas! Hope your day will be filled with some wonderful Christmas cheer! (:

I decided to use two unused polishes for today's glitter challenge so I got to kill three birds with one challenge! I also got to use my Cult Nails Get It On base coat and Wicked Fast top coat too so it's actually five birds with this challange.

I did a thin coat of Get It On and it dried really fast and prevented staining. I'm not sure if it actually helps to make the polish apply more smoothly or make it apply more opaque, but I don't have any complains about it. I think using a base coat and top coat from the same brand will probably help to keep the polish on the nail better, due to the chemistry.

Next, I did two coats of OPI Road House Blues. I went for the SpaRitual basic nail course a few days ago and during the course, the nail technician told us that we should always do a thin first coat, let it dry before doing a second coat and a third if necessary. She stressed the importance of not piling on coats of polish immediately and to let the coats dry to allow the true colour of the polish to come out and I'm guessing doing so will also reduce streaking.



After waiting for Road House Blues to dry, I layered a coat of OPI Last Friday Night on top.



Don't you think it looks fab? I think it looks out of this world. Literally, like some galaxy far far away (pun intended).

After waiting 5 minutes for Last Friday Night to dry a little, I painted on Wicked Fast.



I didn't want to risk spoiling the manicure and causing the polish to streak, like in the case of the Revlon Quick Dry Top Coat, which was why I waited. Compared to Revlon, Wicked Fast is a little thicker but it applied much better and dried faster too! It's still significantly thinner than SV or Poshe but with one coat of Wicked Fast, it managed to make the gritty surface of Last Friday Night smooth, so I'm thinking it's a pretty good alternative to SV.

I couldn't resist taking more pictures because of how simple and yet complex the combination looks!







Isn't this combination so purrrrdy? (:

Hope you'll have a good Christmas filled with Joy, Laughter and Warmth!