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Thursday, January 26, 2012

I do this every time...

           I've had a couple people jokingly say that I should paint nails for a living, to which I jokingly respond that there's no way I could ever make that work. Each time I paint my nails it's two hours of mistakes and redos. For one, I've long given up on putting on polish without getting it all over my fingers. I'm more from the school of "paint now, clean up later." Also, I have a tendency to screw up as I go along; pretty much every nail design is completed through a string of curses and cries of despair as I manage to screw up yet another finger. Nine times out of ten, my nails end up looking like this:
Above: attempt number two at having nails that look good.
          Can you imagine? You go in to get your nails done, and after an hour you think you're getting close to being finished. Suddenly, the person doing them grabs some nail polish remover and takes off three of your near-complete designs. After a moment of shock, you manage to pull yourself together and demand, "What the hell are you doing?" To which your manicurist replies, "Oh, I screwed up on those ones, so I need to take them off and start again." Then she manages to screw up another nail, and another, and suddenly your manicure took twice as long as it should have and isn't pretty enough for it to be worth it. No, I'll stick to doing my own nails, thank you very much.

           Now, for this week's nails! Here's the final product:


          I needed to try and match a dress I'm going to be wearing to a wedding this weekend. I didn't have much time so I didn't want a very intricate design, and I had to find one that suited my currently very short nails. A few sites show how to do gradient nails by blending the colours using a toothpick, and while I like the look I've tried it and, well, that method is a little outside my skill level right now. I've used sponges on my nails before though, and decided to try to use one to get a similar effect. So I grabbed a few supplies and gave it my best shot.
          First I applied my base colour:

Colour shown is Sea Siren from LA Colors. You can see my "clean up later" method too.
         The next (and final) step was to add the dark colour to make the gradient. To do this, I used a pair of tweezers to rip off a piece of a makeup  pad, like so:


          I then used it to sponge on the dark polish in a variety of thicknesses. I had a few issues with the sponge leaving behind little crumbs in my nail polish, but I found that they were fairly easy to remove with the tweezers and any marks left behind weren't noticeable. For the transition point, I would dip the sponge in the polish, blot it on some paper a few times, and then applied it to the nails. On some nails this still left a very noticeable line, so on those I would sponge some of the lighter colour over top.

Colour shown is Blue Lagoon by LA Colors.
           After that it was simply a matter of cleaning the nails and putting on a top coat, and voila! Gradient nails that didn't require a toothpick. They are by no means perfect, but I'm still happy with the overall effect. I do wish I'd chosen a different base coat, this one ended up looking a lot more green than I though it would and so it doesn't match my blue dress as well as I would like. But that's just me being picky.

          On another note, my brushes arrived in the mail today! I've got a few plans for them, can't wait until I get to try them out next week.

Manicures of Evenings Past

To get started, I figured I'd post some of my past nail designs. They started out pretty simple, but I think I've improved a lot. If anyone's interested in seeing how I did any of these designs, just post it in the comments sections and I'll do a tutorial later!



This was the very first design I did. Armed with some cheap nail polish from Claire's and a few design polishes I found at London Drugs, I more or less just started with my favourite colour and worked from there. "Okay, so my nails are blue. Now what? Um...I can probably paint a diagonal. Ooh, that looks good! Now add some silver...IT'S A MIRACLE!!!" I was glad that my first attempt didn't turn out to be a total disaster.




For my second polish, I stuck with my favourite colour. Partly because I didn't have many other options. I gave the half-moon manicure a try. It looked good from a distance. Not so much up close. I should probably mention how much cleaning up I do after painting my nails. I use the "spread it everywhere and worry about the mess later" approach, because otherwise I almost always miss spots.






And THIS was my first real attempt at a proper nail design! I found cutepolish's channel, which opened me up to a whole new world of manicures. She shows how to do very fancy-looking nail polishes that are actually not too hard to do. So I ran out to the dollar store, grabbed a few more decorative nail polishes, and set to it. I also used a makeshift dotting tool for the first time!

 It didn't take long after finding cutepolish to find her galaxy nail design. I immediately fell in love. Unfortunately I didn't own some of the colours needed, and my attempts at mixing the correct colour were less than successful. I also tried to do stippling for the first time, which turned out to be harder than I thought. I intend to try these ones again soon, maybe after my nails grow out a bit more.
Plaid nails! It turns out I've gotten fairly good at designs that only involve straight lines. Go figure. I've also figured out that people don't really notice how good or bad the individual nail designs are, so long as the pattern itself looks cool. Which comes in handy, because my left hand looks good whereas my right hand looks like it was done by a 1st grader.
 I did these, and immediately after finishing I regretted not doing two leaves on the holly. This design took me HOURS, not because it was difficult but because I first did it with a black background, decided I didn't like it, and then took it off and did it all again with this design. This happens more than you would think.
 New year's nails! It doesn't show up very well, but on the ring finger it counts down "3...2" and on my other hand it says "1...". In retrospect I have to admit that using the silver sparkles for the numbers wasn't the best idea. I still like the overall look though.
These are one of my favourite designs I did. Sure, they're more simple and not as out there and noticeable as my other designs, but I like the colour combination. It's very feminine and pretty. And easy to do, which is a bonus.










And THIS was pretty much everyone else's favourite nails. I got more compliments on this design than any other design I've done, partly because it's very bright and you can see it from a mile away. I found these incredibly distracting though. From a distance these looked like some kind of magic eye picture where if I looked at it just right, some kind of image would pop out. This was also the design that took the longest to complete; I think I spent 3 hours trying to get these right.





Last but not least, my pink leopard nails. These were not done with a stamp, every single one of those dots was painted by hand. It's not as hard as it looks, I promise. I think these ended up being my most perfect manicure, mostly because the dots and lines needed to be imperfect. Win-win.







Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Oh hi! I didn't see you there.

I have many blogs. They are mostly about my life, which means they are not that interesting and as soon as things get busy the motivation to write in them drops below zero. Such has happened with my latest blog, Adventures of a Misguided Klutz. However, for my writing to improve I need to actually write. So, I am making a new blog.

About my nails.

Those of you who know me are already well aware that in an effort to grow my nails out I've started painting them, and that I make them as nice as possible to help me resist the urge to pick the nail polish off. I generally do a new design once a week, so if I write about the designs I do I'm guaranteed to post at least that often (or so it would seem). I'll most often be doing a tutorial on my design for the week, plus updates on new products I've found and sites with awesome nail polish designs. I intend to keep my Klutz blog alive for now, because sometimes funny things happen that aren't related to nails and that's the place for it.

That pretty much sums up the purpose of this blog. To all those who actually read it, I look forward to seeing you in my next post!