Rubber Duckies

So I have been part of a nail polish community on Facebook for about a year now and in that time, I have yet to participate in their central challenge, the Tri-Polish challenge. The idea is that a trio of colors is picked each month and your manicures should consist of those three colors. Black, white, silver and gold are also allowed to create the design. It used to be that you used the same 3 polishes all month, but this year they changed the theme to just sticking to the three colors each month, which as a nail polish hoarder, I much prefer.

Anyway, so the colors this month are red, yellow and blue, and I KNEW I could not turn that down. With such a simple combination, I figured I MUST have SOMETHING in the vault for the first day, too, since I did not plan ahead here. Turns out I have quite a few blue, yellow and PINK manicures, but not so many with red. BUT I ended up stumbling on this one which fits the three colors perfectly, and is adorable to boot!

The idea for these came from two places. One, the month I did these, I was hard-x-core into dotticures and I had in my head that I could make some pretty nice bubbles using concentric dots (bringing geometry terms back, here). Two, one of my coworkers is extremely obsessed with rubber ducks and they are all over the office. I will frequently walk into scenes like this in our lobby:

In case you are unclear, that is a Ringtail lemur with a nyan cat bowtie playing with a handheld video game while two rubber duckies watch. I don’t know what game was in there, this was a long time ago.

Now, as a side note here, that rubber ducky obsession is not completely random. In software engineering, we have an “informal debugging technique” called “Rubber Duck Debugging.” The idea is, when you are having a problem with your code, you should stop and try explaining how it works line by line to a rubber duck. When you get to the line you can’t explain, that is more than likely your problem. Hence the  rubber ducks scattered around a software company’s office.

These were pretty time consuming because getting a good overlapped look took quite a few layers, but since each layer dried almost instantly, it evened out in the end. It is definitely a pattern I could see myself using again in different colors.

And unexpectedly, these fit perfectly in the Tri-polish challenge! Hooray!