My Picture Polish!

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Today is a special day: it's My Picture Polish day!

Tri-Holo Lined Gradient Nail Art

Surprise—another stamping manicure! I swear I'm going to push myself to branch out a bit more in the coming weeks, but I just couldn't resist this one.

Picture Polish Valentine Water Marble

Now that I've discovered liquid latex as a liquid tape option for messy manicures, I'm much more willing to play with nail art techniques that tend to be cleanup-instensive. That's how this Valentinesy water marble was born!

 

Minty Fresh Nail Art

Now that Christmas is really closing in (I can't even think about how few days I have left to do All The Things), I'm finally getting the chance to post some of my holiday nail art here for you guys. I have a nice little cache saved up to post this week and next, so I hope you enjoy!

First up is this cute little peppermint manicure inspired partly by the holiday season, and partly by one of the new(ish) piCture pOlish collaboration shades, Minty.

 

piCture pOlish Fool's Gold Swatches and Review

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I don't do straight-up swatch posts too often, so when I do, you know they're going to be pretty special! Today's swatches feature a polish collaboratively designed by one of my favorite brands and one of my favorite nail bloggers—that's about as special as it gets, in my book.

piCture pOlish Blog/Insta Fest 2014

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I'm beyond excited to be sharing today's post: it's piCture pOlish's Blog/Insta Fest day, and I have the great honor of participating this year!

If you haven't heard of the Blog/Insta Fest before, it's a yearly event sponsored by Australian nail polish brand piCture pOlish where selected bloggers share swatches and nail art featuring the company's amazing products. And, this year, we're all featuring Nail Vinyls, too!

This is a long and picture-heavy post, so all the details are behind the cut. Please read on to see my contributions to this year's fest!

Argyle in Green

I generally don't do much to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but I do love green, so I couldn't resist adding a little St. Paddy's spirit to my nail art this weekend by using two of my favorite green polishes.

The Lacquer Legion: Adoration

Sometimes I struggle with nail art inspiration, but coming up with my look for this month's theme from The Lacquer Legion was actually pretty easy! I just thought about everything I truly adore in the nail art world—polish brand, type, and color, as well as my favorite nail art technique—and combined it all into one manicure.

Gradients will always be my first nail art love. One of The Nailasarus's beautiful gradient manicures was the first nail art I really fell hard for and felt like I just had to try myself, and from that point on, I was hooked. As I've experimented with gradients more during the last year, I've found that I especially love them when they're done with holographic polishes: something about all that sparkle transitioning from one color to the other just really works for me. Add in my favorite colors (purple and black) and my favorite polish brands (piCture pOlish and a england), and you've got a gradient I just can't help but adore!

To get this look, I started with a base of piCture pOlish Hussy and then sponged on a gradient using Hussy and a england Bridal Veil with a makeup wedge. It was actually my husband's idea to do the gradient vertically and alternate the color order on each nail, and I really love the effect. It's almost like the gradient runs in both directions at once, which is pretty genius, I think. Thanks, honey!

I would happily wear gradients on my nails all the time, but I know this blog would get pretty boring if I did! However, I do want to sincerely thank the Lacquer Legion ladies for coming up with a great prompt this month that gave me the perfect excuse to put together all the things I love.

See you next month, Lacquer Legion!

Sweet, Sprinkled Skittle

I don't often find myself gravitating toward super girly pinks and pastels, but as soon as I saw piCture pOlish Frosting online, I knew I had to have it. It just looked so sweet and delicious! However, because this color palette isn't my usual thing, I struggled a bit with how to incorporate the polish into a manicure once it arrived. After pulling out lots of polishes and playing with them for a bit, I finally settled on a good ol' skittle mani to highlight the beautiful, creamy base and colorful glitters in Frosting.

My pointer and middle fingers are two coats of Frosting (and a few coats of topcoat to make everything super smooth). It went on really well and I got exactly one heart glitter per hand, which is what I wanted. My ring finger is a gradient of Julep Nellie and China Glaze Spontaneous (applied with a makeup sponge), and my thumb and pinky are Spontaneous stamped with Zoya Marley and plate 03 from the MoYou Fairytale Collection.

Please excuse the slightly botched stamping job on the corner of my thumbnail—the section of the plate I was using wasn't quite big enough, so I patched it as best I could. (My patching skills still need work, ahem. Adding that to the list of stamping stuff I need to improve!)

As is usually the case whenever I do a skittle mani, I have a favorite nail from the group: this time it's the gradient. I just love how perfectly the two colors transition from one to the other!

Here's a closeup of Frosting, just for fun—don't you wish you had a cupcake or cookie that looked like that on top? I know I do!

I'd love to hear what you think of this look—please hit me up in the comments!

Thanks for looking!

A Taste of Gold

For the second day of my red-themed week, I'd like the show you the manicure I wore to my big office holiday party this year.

This is piCture pOlish Vampire with Julep Gianna applied on the tips. This manicure was SO simple, but amazingly well received! I had people commenting on it left and right. Someone even told me she was getting married on Christmas Day and wanted to recreate this look for her wedding, which is just about the best compliment ever, I think.

This is two coats of Vampire and I just dabbed/placed the gold with the brush from the bottle. A generous coat of topcoat helped smooth out everything.

I also have to add a note about Vampire here: what an amazing polish! It was incredibly easy to work with and really just went on perfectly. It also wore very well and looked beautiful for days. I really need to get more bottles of piCture pOlish in my collection!

31DC2013 Day 6: Violet Nails

For day six of the 31 Day Challenge, I decided to try a new (well, new to me) technique: saran wrap nails.

My color in my pictures is a bit more saturated than I'd like (there was more contrast in real life), but this is a base of Essie Under Where? with piCture pOlish Shy Violet layered over the top and then dabbed with a ball of crumpled saran wrap to get the marbled effect. (There are tutorials all over the internet for this technique; Nailed It has a nice one. That is more or less the method I used, except I was lazy and just reused one larger ball of saran wrap for all my nails. It seemed to work fine!)

Next time I try this, I'll probably dab the top layer with the saran wrap more aggressively to get a more drastic marbled effect.