She Said Yeah Striped & Stamped Nail Art

I feel like it's rare for me to run across a (US-based) nail polish brand out in the wild that I've never heard of... but it does happen! When I was at the salon recently, I stumbled upon a new-to-me brand called Smith & Cult, so of course I had to grab a bottle and give it a try. The eye-catching, rocker-inspired display and packaging definitely helped draw me in, too.

Black & Silver Spotty Stamping

I set out recently to find a blue polish that matched a specific shirt I have, and when I saw Butter London Giddy Kipper, I knew immediately that it was the perfect choice.

Bright & Sparkly Stamped Gradient Nails

Gradients and stamping: they're my go-to techniques when I'm short on inspiration. So on those days when I'm feeling doubly uninspired, a stamped gradient must be the way to go, right? Right!

Silky Red Water Marble

I'm still here! Life got a little crazy on me and I fell super behind on my blogging, but I'm hoping that things are getting back to normal now. I've have time to do a few manicures, however, so let's get right to the good stuff, shall we?

One nail art technique that's always eluded me is water marbling. I tried it a few times several months ago with disastrous results, so I gave up on trying for a long time and resigned myself to longingly watching Instagram tutorials and feeling sad about my lack of skills.

I was feeling especially patient and ambitious recently, however, so I decided to give it one more shot—and I actually did it! For the most part! It's far from perfect, but I feel like I can call this my first-ever successful water marble.

Boom Goes the Blue

This is yet another one of those manicures that turned out very differently from what I was picturing, but that I ended up liking a lot anyway. That feels like the story of my life on this blog sometimes! Must be the "amateur" part of Amateur Manicure...

The Lacquer Legion: Glam

I think "glam" is one of those concepts that means drastically different things to different people. For me, I feel like it generally means something along the lines of "fancy, yet classy," so that's the concept I decided to go with for this month's prompt from The Lacquer Legion.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier Nail Art

I really enjoy doing nail art that reflects my other (non-nail-related) interests. During the last year I've done manicures to celebrate my favorite hockey teams and events, my local football team, fashion I admire, and movies I like. It's just so much fun for me to wear my various loves on my nails that I jump at the chance to do so whenever one arises.

With that in mind, I think the nail art event I've personally been looking forward to the most all year has finally arrived: the release of Captain America: The Winter Soldier! I'm a HUGE Marvel comics/movie geek, so I've literally been counting down to this one for something like two years now. And as soon as I started seeing official movie stills and magazine covers being released a few months ago, I started getting nail art ideas.

Adventures in Stamping Post #3: Robots in Love

I have to start this post by saying that I'm incredibly proud of the manicure I have to show you today. I got brave and stepped way, WAY outside my comfort zone for this one, and I'm so pleased with the result!

These cute little robots are from the MoYou Sci Fi Collection Plate 02, which I used to make my own decals. I did a lot of research and watched tons of YouTube videos before attempting this, but in the end, the methods I used are #1 and #2 (as demonstrated by Lucy's Stash in her amazing video tutorials). And I'll be honest: it wasn't as easy for me as she makes it look! I went through a lot of stamping attempts that didn't turn out quite right, and I had a heck of a time getting the finished decals to adhere smoothly to my nails. (Thankfully, my pictures don't really show most of the little air bubbles I accidentally trapped under the decals!). It ended up taking me an entire evening to make six successful decals (three for each hand), but I think it was more than worth it! I wore this manicure for several days and couldn't stop looking at my nails the entire time.

The polishes I used are as follows:

• Zoya Rue for the base
• essence black stamping polish for the stamped outlines
• Zoya Trixie, Zoya Purity, and a-england Rose Bower for the detail on the decals (all painted in with a small detail brush)
• Julep Joelle for the glitter on the accent nails

As I mentioned, putting this manicure together was a really big challenge for me, especially given my overall struggles with stamping. I made sure to go slow and give myself lots of chances to fail/learn from my mistakes, which I think made all the difference for me. I also just had to accept that there would be a few imperfections in the finished look and let go of my frustration over them! So if you're inclined to try making your own decals, my main recommendations are to set aside plenty of time, and don't be afraid to make adjustments and try new things as you go. For example, I learned after applying the first decal that I needed to put down a base of my slowest-drying topcoat first, to give myself plenty of time to get them stuck in the right place before the topcoat dried!

I'm also counting this as a Valentine's Day manicure, because these robots just look so sweet together and I'm convinced they're in love. :)

Anyway, I'd love to hear what you think about making your own decals—hit me up in the comments! Have you tried this before? What worked/didn't work for you? If you haven't tried it, what would you be interested in hearing about/seeing before you do?

Thanks for looking!

Adventures in Stamping Post #2: Things Are Looking Rosy

My mailbox was literally stuffed with nail goodies last weekend (don't you love it when all your incoming packages arrive on the same day? It's like Christmas!), so I decided to use a little bit of everything I received to create this rosy manicure.

I started with a base of a-england Her Rose Adagio on the three fingers I wanted to stamp, and then used a-england Briar Rose and the MoYou Fairytale Collection plate 02 (out of stock right now, unfortunately!) to create the stripes on my pointer, middle, and pinky fingers. And since I'm making a special effort to work on my stamping these days, here's my confession: I originally planned to stamp my thumb, too—with the unicorn image from that plate—but it didn't go well at all. I didn't have the time to try again, so I just painted over the bad stamp job with Briar Rose and left it at that. In the end, think I like the balance of having two darker accent nails here anyway, so it all worked out for the best. Once again, I focused on using polishes that I knew would work and only stamping a few nails to increase my chances of success.

I was so excited to receive my packet of little silver unicorns from She Sells Seashells (unicorns are my favorite!) that I had to use them immediately, too. I added these to my ring fingers while the final coat of Briar Rose was still tacky, and then I sealed them in with topcoat. I did gently bend the unicorns, as She Sells Seashells suggests, but my ring fingernails are so curved that the little horns insisted on sticking out and poking me. I ended up using about three thick layers of topcoat to solve this, which was a little annoying, but didn't affect the look at all—and the unicorns stayed put nicely for the four days I wore them. I'll probably put them on a different finger and/or do a better job of bending them to the shape of my nail before I apply any polish next time.

As wonderful as a-england polishes and unicorns are, however, the most exciting thing about this manicure for me is that I used my new camera to take the pictures! I'm definitely still learning the ropes and figuring out what works best with this new setup, as you can probably tell from the slightly soft focus here, but overall I'm really pleased with how these pictures turned out and I hope my photography skills will continue to improve. By far the BEST thing about the new camera is the custom white balance setting! These pictures needed no color correction whatsoever to look true to life, which is going to save me so much time and headache when processing my images.

Thanks for looking!

Christmas Candy Gram

I've been wearing this manicure for a few days now, and I can't decide what it reminds me of more: mint candies & other delicious holiday goodies, or an over-the-top holiday sweater. Either way, I think this is definitely a Christmasy look through and through!

I started with a base of tenoverten Carmine on all my nails (except the ring finger—that got a base coat of Zoya Trixie). Then I stamped the snowflake-y pattern from MoYou's Artist Collection Plate 04 on my index and middle finger with Trixie, and used striping tape and Carmine to do the stripes on my ring finger. Finally, I painted/dabbed on a generous coat of ILNP Candy Gram on my thumb and pinky.

This manicure marked my first attempts using my new MoYou stamping plates, and I'm really loving them so far! MoYou is the hot new name in nail stamping right now, and I can definitely see why. The plates are very high quality and full of gorgeous images that transfer really well. I'm kind of a terrible stamper—my New Year's resolution is going to be improving my stamping skills, in fact!—but even I had a pleasant experience using these plates. Check them out if you have the chance!

Thanks for looking!

Glitter Giveaway!

Today is a special day at Amateur Manicure: I'm sponsoring/hosting my first giveaway! I love entering all the amazing giveaways in the nail blogosphere and I've always thought it would be especially fun to run one, so after studying up a bit on how these things usually go, I think I'm finally ready to try it. What can I say: it seemed like the perfect way for me to celebrate my first year (well, partial year) of nail blogging—and also say thanks to all of you who've been following along with me so far. :)

Anyway, on to the the stuff!

I love going super glitzy with my nails this time of year, so that probably explains how I ended up with a bunchy of sliver and gold glitter in the lineup for this giveaway. I just have glitter on the brain! One winner will receive all of the following:

• The New Black Glimmer Twins 2-Piece Nail Polish Set in both Golden Ticket and Revolver 
• Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure in Midnight Glitz
• One $15 gift certificate to Llarowe

Please enter using the Rafflecopter widget below. You must be a follower of Amateur Manicure to win. Because there are so many restrictions on shipping nail polish and I'd like to stay compliant with all laws, this giveaway is only open to continental US residents. (I have plans for another, less region-restricted giveaway soon!) Contest ends January 3, 2013. Prizes are provided and shipped by Amateur Manicure. The winner will have 48 hours to claim their prize before a new winner is selected. More detailed terms and conditions are listed in the widget. Good luck!


a Rafflecopter giveaway

31DC2013 Day 8: Metallic Nails

I was really stumped when it came to putting together a metallic nails look—and I'm not even sure why! I have plenty of metallic polishes that I love. As a result, I went through a couple of different manis before I finally settled on one that I liked well enough to wear and post here.

My brain kept circling back around to the idea of diamond plate when I tried to think of "metallic" ideas, so after trying some other things, I decided to just give in and attempt a diamond plate look. I started with a base of Zoya Claudine on all my nails, and then on my thumb and ring finger I used Zoya Trixie and a small nail art brush to freehand a diamond plate pattern. Then I used some nail glue to attach diamond-shaped silver studs from the Born Pretty Store to my other fingers.

Looking at these pictures, I just realized that I've now done two monochrome manicures in a row—sorry about that! I promise I'll include some actual colors next time. :)

Silver & Black Swirly Stamping

I was short on time this past weekend, so I took a little break from my (very slow!) progress on the 31 Day Challenge to do a little quick stamping manicure.

I started with a base of Zoya Freja and then stamped this pretty little wind/cloud-like design* from the Messy Mansion MM09 plate using Essence Stampy Polish in black. Not too much else to say about this one, other than the fact that this was my first time using the Stampy Polish and it worked beautifully! I'll definitely be picking up more of it.

*I feel like this design element must have a particular name, and I feel terrible that I can't find it anywhere, so feel free to let me know if you know what it's called and I'll update the post!