Alright, I have hardcore fallen off the wagon with this challenge, but I’m getting back on this week! The theme is “spring” and I totally did spring-y nails this week without even planning to! The boyfriend went to Korea for a training exercise and asked what I wanted him to bring back. Um, nail polish, duh. So he brought me three bottles! I love the mental picture of him standing in a makeup store staring at the bottles and trying to figure out which colors I might want. This is what he ended up with and I think he did a pretty good job!

Those are my robot salt and pepper shakers. I can wind them up and they walk across the table. They’re pretty great. And perfect for my office, since they’re a little small for sharing at a table.

So this week I did reverse stamping or decals. I tried them once before with my new Miracle Mat and they were not worth displaying. I’m still working out the kinks, but I’m getting there!

Get it? They’re love birds BECAUSE MY LOVE BIRD BROUGHT ME THE NAIL POLISH I USED.

What I struggle with the most is getting the decal on so that it doesn’t lift the bottom polish up and get uneven. You can see it on my accent nail. I haven’t figured out how to make that work for me. I tried painting my clear decals with the base color and it didn’t really help. I’ll figure it out someday! Just gotta keep trying!

Enjoy the other spring manicures!

This films prompt was tough on me. I’m not a huge movie watcher. I don’t mean that in the elitist, “I don’t even own a television” way, I watch a shitton of TV, but the length and pacing of movies just does not suit my attention span very well. I’m usually doing other things when the TV is on, as well, and the penalty for missing something in the plot of a movie is much higher. Because that plot is going to be happening for the next 2 hours.

So anyway, I didn’t really want to do a favorite movie, but my friend Kenley suggested I do popcorn instead! I liked the iconic, but playful feel and I went with it!

This was the first iteration, but I wasn’t loving having popcorn on all 4 nails, it was a little overwhelming to me, so I tried a few other things as well.

I tried other movie snacks, but those were a trainwreck. Then I added some marquis lights, in an attempt to invoke the vintage theater feel, and I was kind of digging that!

I’m pleased with the final result, but looking back at the photos, I think I like the original manicure best! 

I really need to get my lighting in this new house figured out, yo. I used to rely on sunlight to take my photos, but that’s a very rare occurrence over the winter months in Tacoma. I literally leapt up from my desk in the middle of work in order to take these! (I work from home, although I’ve definitely taken nail photos at work. My desk at my last job got GREAT sun.)

And the manis from the rest of the challenge participants!

So for the first time, I am posting from our NEW HOUSE. I have an office and a desk and everything, which makes doing MY JOB so much easier. It also makes blogging easier, but I don’t get paid to do that. I’m a software developer, mostly web applications right now, lots of front-end, trying to add a little bit of “designer” to my job description. So 90% of what I do is Javascript! (little bit of CSS on the side) So I did a stylized JavaScript Manicure!

My first nail is two forward slashes, which mark a line as a comment and it will be ignored by the complier. Comments are mainly for explaining your code, both for your furture reference and for shared code, but as I’m developing I’ll have a lot of lines that say things like “//What the f*** am I trying to do here? This seems like a terrible way to do it, but I can’t get it to work otherwise!!!!” The idea is to delete them before I share my code…although I don’t always remember. Anyway, I made them in grey because that’s generally what most IDEs and text editors do, so you can distinguish them from the rest of your code at a glance.

My next nail is an opening curly brace. Javascript LOVES curly braces. They are everywhere. They define objects, which are the fuel upon which Javascript runs. The curly brace was actually the inspiration for this manicure, as I realized how aesthetically pretty they were on their own! Following that nail is “.js”, simply the file extension for a Javascript file. Also coincidentally, my initials.

I finished it up with a semi colon, because every single statement in Javascript ends in a semi colon! Actually, putting the semi colon at the end was a coincidence, I put it there because it would be easy to draw on my thin little pinkie nail, but I can pretend it was deliberate!

Enjoy the other Ladies’ jobs! I’m so curious and excited to find out what ya’ll do for a living!

Happy Halloween! I knew weeks ago that I wanted to do cute monster nails for Halloween, but I wanted to guarantee that they were unique and different from any other cute monster manicure! So instead of Halloween colors, I went with pink! That decisions also does double duty and until I get the majority of my nail polish in the move, I don’t own any orange nail polish, nor any particularly interesting greens. I mostly packed fall colors for this in-between period of the move.

But oh my gosh, I LOVE them! I only had three pinks with me, one of them being the very pale pink that is on the ghost and vampire nails, but it totally worked! I’m not particularly into the creepy parts of Halloween, so this manicure is PERFECT for me.

Originally I wanted to do a pink gradient under each of them, but it turns out I didn’t have any makeup sponges in the apartment, and I didn’t think my boyfriend would be very happy with me if I ruined our one dishwashing sponge to do my nails. The graphic solid skittle turned out much better than I expected, though!

Seriously, I love them. That Frankenstein nail took me at least 3 tries. I kept trying to do his eyes in black with white pupils like the vampire, but with his brow ridge (and the lack of contrast on the dark pink), it looked like sunglasses every. single. time. I found my failures ironic, considering that I’ve actually painted an entire manicure of him before, so I was expecting the vampire or mummy to be the difficult ones, not the design I had already succeeded with in my early years of nail art!

And, the other ladies’ manicures! Enjoy, there are some pretty great ones!

Well I suppose these are called “challenges” for a reason. I had an idea I thought was great for these, but the execution killed me! They turned out alright, but oy, they were a headache.

So a while back I planned to redesign the look of my blog with a kind of “retro science” theme (Jeanettically, get it?) and I asked my chemist sister to make me some images of the main chemical building blocks of nail polish. That redesign never came to be, but I’m now somewhat familiar with the chemical structure of acetone, nitrocellulose, ethyl acetate, and dibutyl phthalate!

So these were round one. Actually, round two, I first tried with a regular tipped sharpie, but it was kind of old and the lines were too thick and sloppy, so I had to go out and buy some fine tipped sharpies. Which, given that until Sunday I was carless, took me a while. Seriously, I’ve been attempting this manicure for weeks now. Anyway, I acquired the fine tipped ones and tried again. Took this shot before putting on topcoat, which was a good thing, because my seche vite is thick and gloppy and streaked the HECK out of it. My index finger is dibutyl phthalate, which is a plasticizer in polish. It’s banned in the EU, but it’s a cute molecule and fun to draw, so I kept it. My middle and ring fingers are both parts of the nitrocellulose molecule, also pretty standard in making nail polish. That’s a fun molecule, the cellulose part means it can pretty much create chains with itself forever (assuming I understood my sister’s explanation correctly). My pinkie contains a mix of ethyl acetate which the nitrocellulose is often dissolved in, and acetone, which of course I’m sure everyone is familiar with.

So I tried again, using my HK Girl topcoat. Better, but that dibutyl phthalate smeared still. The middle nails don’t have topcoat yet. And again, I’m glad I took a picture, because…

Once again, the application of topcoat smeared the sharpie. I gave it quite a while to dry! But at this point, as my fourth try (I re did each nail at least once while trying to get this final shot) I was finished. I also attempted homemade decals, so I suppose I can count this as my fifth try? The decals worked well, but the ink expanded and blurred before I could even attempt to topcoat it.

I don’t think I’ll be using a sharpie for nail art again. He’s a picture of the view of Capitol Lake in Olympia, WA from my apartment to distract you from this trainwreck of a manicure. Oh well, next time will be better! I’m still happy with the idea!

Enjoy the other ladies’ geek manicures! There are certainly some creative ones!

So I’m taking part in another weekly challenge for the next year. Well, actually every other week for me, so I’m hoping I can a) stay commited and b) that it will kickstart my blogging again! It’s been a while, so I might need to just do a wrap up post sometime soon, totaling the last 8 months or so for me. They were a doozy.

Anyway, the biweekly girls in the challenge had the choice between either colors and patterns as their prompt, or themes as their prompt! I chose themes, because I always love the challenge of coming up with something creative and different.

This week was hobbies! Hobbies?!? How can I pick just one!?!? Nail art is a big hobby of mine, but that felt a little obviouse for my taste, knitting and building/refinishing would both be best represented with stamps as supporting players and I do not have access to those right now, since I just moved across the country (story for another day). However, in the last few months I picked up the hobby of soap making and I LOVE IT. I’m trying to start an etsy business on the side. It’s closed now, RE: the move, but I’m hoping to get it up and running again soon! Have a huge batch of pumpkin pie soap that is way too seasonally appropriate to not share!

So soap! I kept it simple and did bubbles. Basically a rehash of my rubber ducky manicure, which was one of my favorites of all time. I kept it simpler in the color scheme (they’re SOPHISTICATED BUBBLES, can’t you tell?), but I also threw in some glitter #alwaysagoodchoice.

Oh, China Glaze Fairy Dust, you make everything magical and better.

I’m in a little furnished apartment temporarily right now. I tried the bathroom lighting as well as the GIANT windows and despite how cloudy it was, I think the window photos won! (First and last)

And a few silver holo bubbles for good measure. Darling Diva Polish. Her stuff is AMAZING guys, check it out. If it had been sunny, man that silver would have rocked your world, I promise.

Enjoy the other ladies’ manicures!

So I seem to be on a bit of a “Geek Love” kick this Valentine’s Day, because the next nails I did were 8 bit hearts. Or pixelated hearts. Whatever you want to call them.

I love these, because they are so simple, but so pretty! Squares, of course, are a bit of a pain to get right, but I’ve certainly improved over the years!

Man, I am terrible at getting holiday nails up in time! I always do a decent job of painting them, and even photographing them on time, but blogging them? Not so much. This time I at least posted them on Instagram, so that’s probably the best way to keep up with the nails I do, if you’re so inclined.

I’d seen a few Valentine nails with an EKG theme, and I loved them all. I love the simplicity, but still the romantic implication, but with a geeky undertone. Of course, I wanted to use some of my new holographic polishes I bought myself for Christmas, and I had a black that was PERFECT.

Of course, it’s winter now, and 9 times out of 10 the sun is not out and taking photos of a holographic nail polish is disappointment incarnate. I love my lighting set-up for most manicures, but it just can’t get the magic of a holo! But in good news, I figured out how to make my flash do it! Before I had only tried with the flash on my iPhone, which did not work at all, but this time I used my actual camera, and they are beautiful. Behold:

I’ve mentioned Chirality before and I still love her polishes. She does an AWESOME job at producing unique colors as holographic, for example some fun muted tones. And of course, a wonderful black holo, definitely one of my favorite nail polishes. This is called Soska, and I love it. And in looking up the link to add to this page, I see she has a new set, called “El Amor de Mi Vida“, which I personally think is TO DIE FOR. I love it. More holographic polishes in muted tones. So beautiful.

There is not much more I have to say about these, so just enjoy the pretty sparkles!

I few months back I purchased some polishes from Pipe Dream Polish. She’s absolutely famous across the indie nail polish world for her spectacular neons line. They’re spectacular for water marbling, and are bright and beautiful WITHOUT a white base coat, which is absolutely unheard of in the world of neons. Every time she does a restock of the A Night in Vegas Cremes, they sell out in less than 4 minutes. It took me weeks and weeks to get my hands on a set, and by the time I did, it was November and I wasn’t feeling too inspired by neons anymore and was much more jazzed about fall colors.

They were soooo pretty though, and I felt very guilty and ungrateful for having not used them yet, since so many other people were (and are) still trying to get their hands on them. I kept trying to work them into various manicures and I kept being dissatisfied with the results. I even tried water marbling with them, and I can confirm that they are fantastic at that! And water marbling is not my strong point, so I was extra impressed.

However, this week’s theme is dots in my 52 week Pick n Mix challenge, so I made rainbow dots! I pinned a manicure just like this a few years back, however she doesn’t have a blog or anything I can actually credit. But it is one of my most re-pinned pins!

Trying to photograph this manicure taught me that my indoor lighting set-up leaves much to be desired when it comes to correct color balance. In good news, there was just enough light outdoors for me to capture these before it was too late.

I can’t wait to do a water marble with these polishes. 

Enjoy the rest of the polishes in the pick n mix challenge this week!

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When it comes to Christmas, I have a huge pet peeve–people referring to holly as mistletoe. They are not the same thing. I found this drawing to highlight the difference. 

It’s a little sassier than I was going for, but it gets the point across succinctly.

I really like mistletoe. It’s a little silly, but I like the tradition! Anything that promotes kissing is good in my book. Apparently it’s been a symbol of love since at least Ancient Greece, which is pretty cool. It’s basically a parasitic plant though, so it’s a little concerning what that implies about love… (It’s not technically a parasite, since it can, in fact, exist on its own, but when attached to a host tree, it will suck the nutrients and kill off branches and possibly the entire tree. According to wikipedia, this is referred to as a hemiparasite). I also learned that part of the tradition is to remove a berry from the sprig of mistletoe with each kiss, and once the berries are gone, no more kisses!

You’ll notice that if you currently google “mistletoe nails”, the images that come up are primarily holly. Incorrect. However, I recently saw these nails by Nails Down South on one of the nail groups I follow and I was very inspired by the muted green mistletoe on a white background, so I decided to do my own.

Love love love love these! Artistic, but not overwhelming, and the muted tones are beautiful, but with just enough glitter. I used my watercolor acetone technique that I discovered when I came up with my watercolor roses art that I did a while back.

I also love the graduated spacing of the stripes, and I’m crazy-proud of those bows. This was just an all-around awesome manicure for me, one that made me happy whenever I looked at it. Actually, the best part of these nails was when the lady working at the post office told me I should use them to “get a cute boy to kiss me.” Seems like a solid plan.

A few weeks back I was feeling a little sad, because it had been weeks since I had done any free-handed nail art on my nails. Between moving and slowly unpacking and painting furniture, I just hadn’t felt it was worth it. But they were feeling a little plain, and I knew a stamp just wouldn’t cut it.

I could have sworn I took more photos of these, but apparently not! Originally I only planned to do the dark green with the gold swirls, but I decided they needed a little more.

It was decided that red rhinestones would really make the design, and I LOVED the results. 

They looked even better in person than they do in photographs, although they look pretty darn good in photographs too!

A few weeks ago my company had their holiday party. Company-hosted parties are always great, but they’re extra fun at a small casual company like mine. As previously mentioned, my company’s mascot is a Ringtail Lemur, so as is my tradition, I of course had to include a lemur in my manicure for the holiday party! Plus more sparkles than usual–it is a celebration after all.

I’m really proud of the detail on my lemur. He’s even got some fur texture going on! The details are much more visible in the second picture. I really like this animals wearing Santa hats design, I may bring it back for another manicure. I’m also quite pleased with how sparkly the rhinestones remained, even under topcoat. I started using Glisten & Glow’s HK Girl topcoat, instead of my usual Seche Vite and I’ve been happy with the change. They both have pluses and minuses, but a big plus of the HK Girl is that it doesn’t ruin rhinestones like Seche Vite does! Overall I think I like the HK Girl better, but Seche Vite would be better in situations that require a heavy, thick topcoat, like over a glitter that won’t stay down.

Funny story about this manicure: I completely forgot the tail originally! admittedly that’s a pretty important part of a RingTAIL lemur, but I was so focused on my execution of the face that I completely forgot until one of my coworkers pointed it out when I was showing them off at work. I wasn’t going to be able to go home before the holiday party, so I had to get creative! So I drew on a tail with white-out and sharpie and covered it with Seche Vite! (I try to have Seche Vite on hand for emergencies, particularly for more formal events) It turned out great, because it made for some cool texture on the tail that I probably would not have been able to achieve with nail polish.

I learned that giant rhinestones stay on your nails even less than the regular-sized ones! By the end of the night I had lost all the rhinestones on my right hand, although miraculously the only one I lost on my left was the one on my thumb!

One of the nail art groups I belong to on Facebook is starting a new weekly challenge and I’m excited to participate! They used to have two challenges, the Tri-polish challenge, where you painted different designs with the same color scheme of three all month, (which I participated in once…ever) and the Golden Oldie challenge, where you used one of your favorite older polishes. And actually there might have been an untried polish thing going on for a while. I wasn’t as much into the old and new polish themes, because, well, they weren’t so much of a “challenge” to me. My favorite part of a challenge is trying to use the prompt to create something new and different from my brain, although I am certainly more creative on some days more than I am on others.

Now, the group has combined into a single “Pick and Mix” Challenge where the prompt each week is a pattern and a color. You can do one, you can do both, any way you want to. And I love it. I think most weeks I’ll do both, but I love all the options this gives, while still keeping somewhat coherent and organized! I’m excited to start! Part of the excitement comes from the fact that the page tells me NOT TO SHARE the prompts outside of the group, so I feel very elite and exclusive.

This week the prompt is “Two color Gradient” for the pattern and “teal” for the color. Luckily for me, I have a manicure in my vault that fits perfectly. My inspiration for this manicure came from the fact that I own tons and tons of stamping plates and RARELY ever use them. I think it’s because they always feel so flat compared to the designs I do free-hand. However, I now see all the cool things people do with stamps, by using multiple stamps, making decals, or embellishing with paint on top and I finally got inspired to actually pull out my binder full of stamping plates. I was also inspired by my new Illamasqua nail polish!

I decided to stamp over a gradient, as I have seen some very beautiful things done with the combination of those two very simple techniques. Then I embellished that with some gold and teal glitter polishes and I ended up quite liking the result!

It’s not the most perfect stamping, but it’s still better than my usual!

I don’t have a ton of quality photos of this, because I believe I was also going through a phase where I decided that I was not going to use the automatic settings on my camera because I was “going to learn how to REALLY use a camera, gosh darnit!”. Hence only 2 photos from the whole lot were even salvageable. I might have also been experimenting with my lighting set-up at the same time. 7th grade science taught me to only change one variable at a time in an experiment, but did I heed their warnings? No, I did not.

Anyway, enjoy the other ladies’ manicures inspired by either “teal” or “two color gradient” or some combination thereof!

So these are the nails that I had in store for you a few weeks ago, and I LOVE them. I love pop art and I have always loved Roy Lichtenstein (and I have even learned how to spell his name without help! With the Tri Polish Challenge theme of primary colors, I knew I’d have a pop art theme in at least one of my manicures for the challenge.

I took so many pictures of these to try to get a good look at the holographic polish. It is from my first Indie polish purchase, which was very exciting for me!

I came around to the Chirality Polish website by way of a google image search for “kale nails.” I was looking for inspiration for a manicure to support the debut of a website I helped a friend of mine make (more on that later) and Chiralty sells a beautiful dark green holographic called Kale so the photo popped up in the search results. The dark green was so unique of a color for a holo polish, so between that and some fun crelly glitters, I was pretty hooked. I hope to make a full post of my haul soon!

I chose the color ED-209 for the silver base between the two silvers I bought from Chirality, because the computer theme made me think geeky, which made me think comic book, which was the vibe I was trying to capture with these nails. The owner of the store, according to her bio and the name of her brand, (I had to look up what Chirality meant, and it was well worth it), is a bit of a nerd. I love when I come across similarly-minded people on the internet! Nail polish freaks who also are into science! She writes intricate stories for each of her polishes which I do find weird, but in a really cool way. The plot of this polish’s story was based on destroying a robot-spider-supercomputer. Doesn’t really get much more nerdy comic book than that!

Now ED-209 isn’t the most brilliant holo polish I have encountered, but it made a PERFECT base for this manicure. I’m excited to eventually use all the other colors I bought, besides the green holo I have this stunning blue holo and a black holo, as well as assorted crellies with large and interesting glitter.

Besides the silver, I used my Barry M nail art pen for the black outlines (a special gift from a friend who visited the UK, although you can order them online from the US, I feel much more important since mine was imported special for me) and the polishes I always use when I want my bluest blue, my reddest red, and my most yellow yellow. I’d tell you what they are, but they have since been packed for my move in a week. ACK I’m moving in a week!

Check out the links below for the other ladies’ renditions of this final week of red, blue and yellow TPC!

So I had an awesome manicure planned for day 2 of August’s Tri-Polish Challenge, but I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to make it turn out well, so I did another one as backup, planning to use the second manicure next week, since this is due to be a busy weekend. Both manicures turned out great, but it’s pouring today and the original manicure was on a holo base which REALLY needs sun to photograph well. So I guess I’ll be switching the weeks! This manicure only has two of the 3 colors, blue and yellow, but I like how I used them! Smiley faces are such a simple, but clear indication of happiness, and to be honest, I’m a major emoji addict. Fun fact, I recently read an article about how our brains now perceive emojis and emoticons in the same processing centers in our brain that we perceive faces. Isn’t that RAD? 20 years ago, the same smattering of characters would not have done that in our brains :) It’s crazy! I added smileys in a few layers of dots of different yellows, much like my rubber duck nails, to get that overlapping look.

So that’s the first set of smileys. They’re pretty wonky, in a half cute, half horrifying way… But I kind of like them!

Here is the second layer. Still wonky, but a little better, as I was learning what strokes worked and what didn’t. Apparently much better, since iPhoto decided it recognized my smileys at people I should tag in some of the photos…

I thought this was hilarious. Oh facial recognition software. It did it more in the low-light pictures, so I’m sure the software is calibrated to be more sensitive in finding faces in pictures in low light.

Last layer!

I think overall they turned out pretty darn cute! I kinda like their specialness. Oooooh this has inspired me to want to use this scheme to do a manicure of lego people. I LOVE this red, blue and yellow color scheme!!!!

Check out the other ladies’ manicures below!