The Lacquer Legion: After Dark - Too-Dark Halloween Nail Art

I was running very short on time for nail art this weekend (frantically working on my Halloween costume, of course!), but I couldn't let this month's Lacquer Legion day pass me by.

The Lacquer Legion Crisp: Striking Striped Nails

After missing the last couple months of The Lacquer Legion, I'm back to join the fun for today's prompt, "crisp." I'm so glad to be getting back into the swing of things with my nail art—I really missed The Lacquer Legion in particular!

Happy as I am to be back at it, however, I'll admit that I had a bit of a hard time with this theme. For the longest time, I could really only think of crisp apples or fall leaves, and I wasn't feeling quite confident enough in my freehanding skills to go that route. In the end, I decided to embrace the idea of crisp, clean lines and just go nuts with some colors that inspired me.

The Lacquer Legion: On Holiday - A Familiar View

It's another Lacquer Legion day! I get so excited for the end of the month now—I just love participating in this group.

The LL mods chose "On Holiday" as this month's theme, and I have to say, this one was equal parts fun and challenging for me. I knew early on what I wanted to do and was excited to try, but I also knew that it would be difficult, so I spent most of the month psyching myself up for it.

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.

The Lacquer Legion: Lucky

It's the last Friday of the month, so it's time for another Lacquer Legion manicure! This time around the ladies who run the challenge chose "lucky" as the theme, and after thinking about it for a little bit, I decided to attempt a more personal take on this prompt than I have for the previous challenges.

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!

The Lacquer Legion: Reinvention

Today is the first posting day for a new nail art challenge: The Lacquer Legion! This awesome idea was put together by the very talented ladies at Chalkboard Nails, The Nailasaurus, Work/Play/Polish, and Rebecca Likes Nails, and the idea is that people from around the nail art community all post manicures fitting a particular theme on the same day and tag them so that they can be viewed across a variety of platforms. I thought this sounded like a lot of fun, and a once-a-month challenge is definitely doable for me, so I decided to put together a contribution of my own.

The first theme they chose was reinvention. I spent a lot of time thinking about this and all the different ways it might be interpreted, but I kept coming back to the idea of a phoenix. The whole death/rebirth in fire thing just seems like a quintessential form of reinvention to me! Also, I knew that a fire-themed look was going to require pulling off some fairly involved nail art—involved for a non-artist like me, anyway!—so I feel like taking the plunge and attempting something like this symbolizes reinventing myself as someone who can be a little brave and try something outside my comfort zone occasionally.

In the end, I went with a stamp/freehand hybrid technique to make my fire and phoenix come to life. I started with a base of Sephora by OPI Never Enough Shoes on all my nails, and then stamped an image of flames from the Messy Mansion MM27 plate using white stamping polish from the Born Pretty Store. Then, using a small detail brush, I added color to the flames on top of the white using Julep Nadia, Julep Marjorie, Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure Red My Lips, and Julep Brenda, in that order.

I mentioned that this manicure was outside my comfort zone, but that's probably a bit of an understatement! Between the stamping and freehanding the colors, I felt very, very challenged by all the techniques I used here. Overall, it didn't turn out quite as neatly as I'd have liked, but from a normal viewing distance it looks okay, so I'm focusing on that. And, more importantly, I came up with an idea and found a way to execute it, which definitely makes me proud!

Thanks for looking, and thank you to the wonderful bloggers who came up with this idea. I can't wait to see what you have in store for us next month!