Outlines

Can we go over how much I absolutely love these outline nails? I think the design out the outline was popularized by Disco Nails, who is totally insanely amazing. The goal with the outline nail is to create a perfect circle or oval in the center of the nail (what I did in purple) using a minimal outline (I used black) to really make it pop. My nails are a bad shape for this design, it looks better on nails that have more rounded beds (mine are square-ish). But I LOVE this design. To spice it up a little, I added some dots and some gems. I really liked how this looked overall, but as you can see on my thumb, it isn't a great look on me. I can't wait to paint this on other people's nails though!

Strawberries and Chocolate

Mmm Strawberries dipped in chocolate. Deliciousness. These aren't my favorite nails. I was going for a curve-y leaf look, but they look a little goofy. I guess these turned out great for cartoon inspired strawberries. For accents I decided to do some chocolate dips. 

The Silence of the Lambs

Thumb - Moth
Index - View from night vision goggles
Middle - Hannibal's mask
Ring - Size 14 clothing tag
Pinky - Sewing pattern on fabric

A long while ago, LittleMonsterx14 of Claws Up suggested some Silence of the Lambs nails. I had two reactions to this: First, I was like, "oh yeah, I can definitely get those done soon" (boy, was I wrong); and second I was like "oh man, I'm gonna do hilarious Silence of the Lambs nails and do things like little fluffy lambs and lotion in a basket." But then, I decided to re-watch the movie to see if I could draw some inspiration. Re-watching The Silence of the Lambs made me completely change my design because at times that movie can be sooo creepy. So instead of funny nails, I took a more serious approach.

If you haven't seen The Silence of the Lambs, I may be about to give some spoilers, and you should probably just go watch it right now anyways. The moth on my thumb is the iconic image of the movie posters. It has a skull on its back (or... it's supposed to, I don't really like how the moth turned out) because it is a Death-Head moth. The night vision goggles on my index finger were included because of the scene at the end of the film where Agent Starling is invading Buffalo Bill's house alone and after he cuts the power he eerily stalks her using the night vision goggles. To me, this is one of the most memorable scenes in the movie. My middle finger has Hannibal's mask because it is so iconic to see Anthony Hopkins in that mask. My ring finger has a size 14 clothing tag. This actually as an aspect of the movie that I didn't really remember, but I found totally chilling. When Buffalo Bill abducts the girl, he knocks her out and says, "You're about a size 14?" He then checks the tag on her clothes and she is in fact a size 14. His familiarity with the female form is striking. Finally on my pinky, I included a dress pattern because when Starling is investigating it is seeing a dress pattern that helps her to realize that Buffalo Bill is trying to sew a suit out of human flesh. 

Aztec

Man, it's been a while since I've posted! This has been a hectic week. I'm doing tons of wedding planning and preparing for nail school, which starts Monday. These are some nails that look a little Aztec-y to me. I ended up adding yellow highlights to them (below), but I think they look better just black and purple (above). What do you think?

Don't forget to pop over to Polish Art Addiction to see my Peculiar Polish entry. This time around I did Zoombinis, a computer game with some totally adorable characters!

Striped Gradient

You may remember for Halloween that Michelle from Sonoma Nail Art did a spooky candle gradient during her 30 day challenge (if you don't remember, you can see it here). I thought it turned out totally awesome and used it as inspiration for these nails! Instead of doing a normal faded gradient, I used curved stripes to give the look of gradient nails. I loved these because from afar they look like normal gradient nails but up close they have awesome detail! After painting these I realized that they looked like the sky, so after a few days of wear I ended up painting some flowers coming out of my cuticles. This ended up being a mistake: they looked weird and it took away from the simplistic awesomeness they already had.

Have a wonderful new years celebration tonight! I will be posting my favorite nails of the year tomorrow, so make sure to check back to see some old designs!

Lotus

When I started painting these, I was trying to mirror my engagement ring which has a long oval in the middle and two side-ways ovals framing it. The design turned out looking more like abstract lotus flowers to me, which is awesome! This was one of those really simple designs that I ended up loving! Plus it was super simple to do. I have a feeling I'll be doing this design again!

Sweetheart

These are some unfinished sweetheart nails. I don't remember why I only photographed them at this stage and not at the end! I think next time I tried this design I won't let the points be as dramatic. 

Bad Galaxies

I went a *little* over board on sponging on more colors with these galaxies and they turned out a little crazy looking. Oh well, lesson learned. Stop while you're ahead!

Today I'm wedding dress shopping for the very first time!!!

Metal Gods

Don't forget to check out my guest post at Polish Art Addiction today! I did some Tank Girl nails!

Two days ago, on Tuesday, I took the last exam of my undergraduate degree. Because it was my last semester I decided to take a couple of fun classes. You may recall from my Godzilla nails that I took a film class about Godzilla movies, well my other class was a class about the history of heavy metal! I've been listening to metal for 15 years now, so I figured that their couldn't be a more perfect class for me! One of our assignments was that we had to go see the band Judas Priest perform live at a concert. I know... What an awful assignment! Haha! The best part of the assignment was that I would have gone to the show anyways, but since I was part of the class we got discount tickets!

I painted my nails for the concert, like I usually do, but I only had about ten minutes to paint them! I have a really really really awesome Judas Priest nail art idea, but it'll have to wait until I have more time! For now, all I've got is this logo!

Spinal Tap 11/11/11

These go to 11! For 11/11/11, I wore This Is Spinal Tap nails! An infamous scene in the movie This Is Spinal Tap has  Nigel Tufnel (played by Christopher Guest) explaining that his amp can go one louder because it goes to 11 (where typically amps only go up to 10). On my thumb is the dial turned all the way up to 11 and the rest of my fingers have the Spinal Tap logo.

A lot of others wore Spinal Tap nails for 11/11/11 but my absolute FAVORITE are Michelle from Sonoma's Nail Art which can be seen here. Michelle is a rockin' nail artist... I mean, really rockin'. And for her Spinal Tap nails, she actually did a portrait of Nigel! 

Basketweave

Previously, I did a really complicated basketweave pattern which can be seen here that I'm really proud of, but it took forever! This time I wanted to do something simple and fast. From far away, I think the two designs looks pretty similar! I don't have a lot to say about these, so I'll tell you about my plans for the next week.

I'm leaving town tomorrow for about a week to go to sunny California! Because of this, I will be queuing up a bunch of posts, so don't worry, there will be lots of nail art over the next week! I also want to remind you that this Thursday, and every Thursday, I'll be guest posting over at Polish Art Addiction. In the mean time, as long as you're checking out my blog, why not pop over there as well?

The only unfortunate part about me going out of town is that I'll largely be MIA when it comes to responding to comments or requests. I'll hop on my computer a few times while I'm gone, and I promise that as soon as I'm home I'll catch up!

Another exciting thing that will be happening in the first week of the new year is that I'll be starting nail tech school! I know, super exciting! I'll be blogging about my progress and what I hate/love about it.

Here's the first thing I expect to hate:
They give you a break down of the hours that you do each thing so I found out that I will be learning about foot fungus for 8 hours and  nail art for ONLY 4 HOURS! What?!!! Crazy. 

Cherry Blossoms

Ahh cherry blossoms! I see so many awesome cherry blossom nail designs that I knew I needed to try them out. Some of my favorite designs are the ones that are inspired by Arizona Iced Tea. I didn't want to be *too* literal, so I only used some color inspiration from the Arizona Iced Tea bottles. I ended up with a simple french tip with accents of the beautiful flower.

Leslie from Polish Art Addiction asked a great question in the comments that I thought I would address here (since I needed to edit this post anyways). She asked if I use a top coat and about the matte finish that a lot of my photos have. The answer is that I usually use a matte top coat! For these nails, like lots of others, I used partially acrylic paint and partially polish. When I use Kleancolor's matte top coat over this combination, I get a look like above. I love the matte look, it just suits my style. I actually started liking the matte look because I stink at taking photographs of my nails and when I used shiny top coats I found that I would get the sheen of the flash right over the details of my nails! Ughh!! Once I started with the matte top coats, I fell in love. Some of my older nails are painted by using all acrylic paints and no top coat, which also gives a matte appearance. Usually when I do that, I put a top coat on right after I take the pictures.

Mod-ish Flowers

One way that I come up with new nail designs is by flipping through fabric patterns and this is a design that was inspired by a pattern that I saw. I didn't take a picture of the pattern, but I do remember that it was lime green and white. I decided to mess around with some possible wedding colors so I used a very light lavender (it looks more grey in these photographs), chartreuse, and black.

I loved how these nails turned out! But they didn't get much of a response on tumblr. What do you think?  I'm starting to think that my bad photography skills are affecting how awesome my nail art looks. 

The Vampire Diaries

Okay, I'm going to be honest, I know absolutely nothing about The Vampire Diaries and when Nail Polish Is Cool  suggested these, I wasn't *that* excited to do them. But I love getting requests, and Nail Polish Is Cool has always been extremely nice to me, so I'm more than happy to oblige her requests! I still don't really know much about The Vampire Diaries, but I do know that it has vampires, so I decided to do some bloody teeth. I kind of messed up the logo, but I think it still looks kind of like like it's supposed to.

But these nails are far from the most exciting thing going on today! Today is the first day of a collaboration that Leslie from Polish Art Addiction and I are working on. I did a guest post over at her blog, and I will be posting over there every Thursday! The series is called Peculiar Polish, and it's just what it sounds like: I'll be doing nail art that's a little weirder, a little darker, and sometimes downright creepy! A lot of the nails are comic book related, so I hope that that excites some people! This week I posted some Casper nails! I hope you enjoy them, and while you're over there, if you haven't already, make sure that you check out Leslie's nail art! She is the master of cartoons!!

French Tips

After getting engaged, the last thing that I wanted was for my nail art to overshadow my new shiny ring, so i went with a very simple french tip. I didn't have time to take pictures for a few days so you can see there is some tip wear on these. I used an acrylic paint to get the nude color and a white Wet N' Wild polish. Then I used Kleancolor's matte top coat, which I absolutely love. I also put on two little jewels that Ron's mom gave me to accent my ring fingers. I hadn't ever used 3D nail art stuff before and I loved it! To attach them I simply put them on my nail while my top coat was still wet. I didn't top coat over them (I read that this makes the facets less obvious) and they stayed on perfectly for about 4 days (and probably would have stayed longer if I hadn't got bored and took them off). 

Exhumed and My Engagement Story

Okay, so I know a lot of you have already heard this story, but it's so awesome I need to share it again!

When I first posted about getting engaged, I didn't show you a good picture of the nails I had on, so here they are! Ron and I (and a bunch of our friends) went to see one of my favorite death metal bands Exhumed, and of course, I had to paint their logo on my nails! What I didn't know is that by the end of the night I would have something other than awesome nail polish on my finger (how cheesy was that?!).

I think the best way to find out how Ron proposed is to watch the video, but I'll give you a mini-synopsis and warn you that THE VIDEO IS GOREY. Like I said, we were at the Exhumed concert and all of a sudden, the front-man of Exhumed, Matt Harvey, says "Where's Ron?" then he points at me and says, "You too, come up here!" As I make my way to the stage, I realize that Ron is about to propose (or if he isn't, I'm about to be mega-disappointed haha), but instead of just getting down on one knee, he quite literally gave me his heart. You can see the whole thing in this video. Which again, is a pretty awesome video.



Here is what Exhumed's logo actually looks like.

What Else Would I Be For Halloween...?

Oh man... Haven't you just been waiting for today? I know I have!!! It's totally possible that I'm more excited about this than you, but finally... I PRESENT TO YOU... My Halloween nails!

TACO BELL!!!!

I love Taco Bell (which, if you read my blog a lot, you are probably tired of hearing). It is the best. It is gooey and delicious and full of happiness. So for Halloween I was a Taco Bell Hot Border Sauce! Below is a picture of my (home made) costume. But let's be honest, the nails complete the look! I was so happy with out these turned out. I've done Taco Bell nails tons of times before (You can see a simple logo design here and a first attempt at the Border Sauce look here), but these are BY FAR my favorite!

On my nails I painted the Taco Bell logo, the bell, and the word "Hot" in the Border Sauce lettering, since I was a Hot Sauce! Yay. Total happiness.

Well... Not total happiness... It's only 8am and Taco Bell isn't open yet so I'll have to wait to quench my craving until later today.

Brainsss....

... Or intestines, maybe? I don't know, these definitely don't look like brains, but I'm not totally sure what they *do* look like! To get this look, I followed Robin Moses' tutorial which can be seen here. She is the tutorial guru and I'm sure that if you follow her instructions you'll turn out with a better set of brains than I did! A problem that I have with nail art is that I'm not really that good at art -- I mean, I can copy things just find but when it comes to doing something more free form like brains I'm not always the best at figuring out how to make it look good. I hope this gets better with practice!

Anyways, another brains related post that you should check out is Michelle aka Sonoma Bento's Hello Kitty Halloween nails.  Michelle and I are both huge fans of Robin Moses (let's be honest, who isn't), so when Michelle saw Robin's tutorial she always knew she had to turn it into something new and creative! Michelle's take on the design is AWESOME!

Also, I may not post anything tomorrow BUT there's a good reason why. The post that I was going to do tomorrow is so awesome, so incredible, so magnificent, that I hate to post it on a Sunday (which is the day I get the least traffic). The post is the nails you've all been waiting for: my ACTUAL Halloween nails. And let me tell you, they are some of my favorite nails EVER!  So, I promise if there is no post tomorrow it is well worth waiting until Monday!!!

Edward Gorey Tree's

We are getting closer and closer to my actual Halloween nails!!! Aren't you so excited? They are probably my favorite nails ever. But for now, here are some Edward Gorey inspired trees.  Edward Gorey is one of my favorite author/artists. If you aren't familiar with him, he is infamous for writing very macabre picture books. If you were to just glace at his work you might think it was a children's book, which I suppose it could be, but an adult would truly see the sadness in his art. A lot of people compare him to Charles Addams (you know, The Addams Family), but I never really saw it. I always felt that Gorey had a melancholy surrounding his work where as Addams was much more humorous (if you're not really into macabre things, you might disagree with me on this one). Some of my favorite works by Gorey include The Doubtful Guest, The Epiplectic Bicycle, L'Heure Bleue, The Hapless Child, The Remembered Visit, and probably most significantly his illustrations for Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S.Eliot, which is the collection of poems that were the inspiration for the Broadway musical Cats!

For these nails I took inspiration from his most famous work which is The Gashlycrumb Tinies which is the alphabetic stories of 26 children's deaths. Below I included "K is for Kate who was struck with an axe," because the trees in this image were my main inspiration. Also, I totally just noticed that "an axe" is completely wrong gramatically... I guess he was just trying really hard to maintain the couplets since, "L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks."

Owls and Moons

Tony, from TonyLikesThings on tumblr is awesome because he always has tons of nail art ideas! He asked for the Joy Division nails that I did here and ever since he will randomly ask me to do other nails. When he requested owl nails around Halloween, I decided to skip the super cute cartoonish owls that a lot of people have already done and go for something slightly more realistic. I ended up with this night scene that has an owl perched on a tree under the moon. Unfortunately for Tony, the owl didn't turn out very good. But I think the moon looks great! If I were to go back and do it again, I would try to make the owl stand out more... He sort of faded into the background. Oh well!

Also, if anyone has any, I sure could use some more requests!