Showing posts with label holographic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label holographic. Show all posts

Thursday, March 29, 2012

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Tiger Stripes

It's Thursday and that means you should pop over to Polish Art Addiction to see my latest Peculiar Polish (I did Family Guy nails this week)!
In line with my new love for animal prints I thought I would do some tiger stripes. I've seen these gradient tiger stripes before and figured I'd try them out myself! Every time I looked down at these nails I was reminded of one of my favorite childhood books: How the Tiger Got Its Stripes. The book is originally a Viatnamese folk tale and I'm not sure which version I used to read, so I can't tell you an author. Another great book in the series was How the Peacock Got Its Feathers. Anyways, I loved these simple nails and wore them for ages. I used a special top coat on them which I'll be posting about soon. It is a special hardening top coat that doesn't need to cure under a UV light but acts like typical gel top coats. 
Here's the nails before I added the stripes. You can see that I put a holographic coat over the gradient to really make them pop!

Thursday, December 29, 2011

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Brown Gradient

I was trying to go for a brown autumn-y gradient. But instead my nails just look dirty. I used holographic nail polishes to add some sparkle to this design, but it just ended up looking weird.

Don't forget to check out Leslie's blog Polish Art Addiction to see my newest Peculiar Polish blog, which is about Avatar: The Last Airbender. (There's even a tutorial!)

Thursday, November 24, 2011

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Halloween on Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! 
I thought I'd celebrate by sharing more old Halloween nails with you!

Here's another design by the amazing Lex at Attacked Astoria Nails. If you can't tell by the fact that I love to attempt her designs, I think she has a really awesome style. You can see her original nails here. She used a shimmer to top off her gradient, but because I don't own any shimmers, I ended up using Kleancolor's orange holo. I thought that it blended the gradient background perfectly.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

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The Muppets

You may recognize these nails from when I posted them here, but one of the reasons that I enjoy doing this blog is to easily see my progression as a nail artist, so it is really important to me to post my nails in the order that I painted them.

I did these Muppets nails as a memorial to Jim Henson shortly after his passing. I know that Henson has inspired countless individuals and I am proud to be one of them. He changed the puppets, children's shows, and probably everything else that he was involved in. Though I am a huge Muppets fan, my favorite of Henson's work was probably for the television show Dinosaurs, which was essentially The Simpsons but with dinosaurs.

This posting is a little bit too early for the upcoming film The Muppets, which I anticipate seeing, but I hope that if you see it before I do, you let me know how it is!

Saturday, October 29, 2011

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My First Haul

Well, this was my first and probably last haul! It isn't my last because I had a bad experience, just because I'm cheap! I heard about Kleancolor and went to their website and found about one million things that I *needed* so I bought them all. I didn't do any swatches because I kind of find swatches boring, but if you're curious about ANY of these products, feel free to ask me to do a swatch of something and I'll happily post it!!!

This is everything I got! You'll notice in the background the Hair Polisher, which ended up kind of sucking. It was very thick and a bit greasy. I got it for my boyfriend because he likes a silky product in his hair, but it was definitely a bust. 
Here from left to right we have: Cuticle Remover, Calcium, and Madly Matte

The Cuticle Remover doesn't seem to do very much, I'm honestly not sure what the difference between good cuticles and bad cuticles is. I only know what the difference between average cuticles and INSANELY GOOD cuticles looks like. The Calcium works nicely, I like to use calcium as a base coat, and this one doesn't allow staining any more than any other base coat, so it works nicely for my purposes. Madly Matte is wonderful. I have been wanting a matte topcoat for some time now because I LOVE how matte nails look (so much so that sometimes I don't top coat my acrylic paints so that they keep their matte-ness). Madly Matte does what you would think it would do, but I've never used any other matte topcoats, so I can't compare it to other things. 

And here is the reason I went to Kleancolor in the first place: Chunky Holo Black, Chunky Holo Bluebell, and Chunky Holo Fuschia

Oh man, oh man. I love these so much. Chunky holo black is like my favorite thing ever. I like the picture that I took here because it gives you a good idea of what these colors look like if you don't use a base coat. The "black" is almost like a mustard-y brown, the bluebell is a light-ish blue with hints of red, and the fuschia is vibrant with hints of blue. Over a solid color base coat, these all look essentially the same. The one difference is that the black has multiple sizes of holographic hexagons where as the bluebell and fuschia only have one size. This makes the black almost look like a flakey.

An important thing to know about these is that they stink, literally not figuratively (figuratively they rock). When you open up the polishes there is a pungent smell that can easily over take a room. This didn't bother me too much, but I could see how some people might not like that. But for the price, about $2 each, can you really complain?
Left to right: Born to the Purple and Blue-Eyed Girl

I really like both of these. They are both full of two sizes of hexagon glitter and have dark jelly bases. The colors look a lot like how they do in the bottles. The only problem that I had with these two polishes was that the polish dries really really slow. For me, that was a hassle because I generally don't have a huge amount of time to paint my nails so having to sit around without moving my fingers was really annoying. On the plus side though, the hexagons easily came out of the bottle and applied thickly to the nails, so there was no lack of glitter!


Left to right: Holiday Jingle, Golden Nightmare, Holo Orange

Holiday Jingle is totally un-holiday. In the bottle it appears to be a dark green glitter, making it perfectly Christmas-y, however on the nail it is really bright green. It is neon enough that I wouldn't call it a holiday green. What I do love about it though is that the glitter is SUPER dense, so your nails just look like glitter, not at all like polish. Golden Nightmare is a black with gold sparkles. It applied nicely and looks almost like a night sky, I like using it as a background for galaxy nails! Holo Orange is gorgeous, it is what it says it is, a holographic orange polish. It isn't as dense as some holos are, so it works really nicely over top of another polish. It can definitely also work alone, and if you want to wear it by itself it looks very much like it does in this picture and only takes a few coats to become opaque. 

I also got this set of tiny tiny beads for nail accents, they are hard to apply, but I love how they look. I also go a package that looks exactly like this of holographic glitter, but it was insanely hard to photograph, so there are no pictures.


Anyways, I hope this was interesting, and like I said, if you want to know more about any of the products, feel free to ask!

Sunday, October 9, 2011

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Hello Kitty

Hello Kitty nails were requested by Ron's mom Susie. I was never a huge fan of Helly Kitty, but I do like a lot of the other  Sanrio characters (like Keroppi). I got inspiration from Simply Rins' design which is both beautiful and simplistic. It didn't photograph well, but if you look closely you can see that there is actually holographic glitter on top of the green. It's actually a holographic acrylic paint... I was trying  to find a cheaper alternative to amazing holo nail polishes, but it kind of failed in that it wasn't very striking. Oh well!

Saturday, September 24, 2011

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Jim Henson's The Muppets

As you might know, I hate posting the nails I've painted out of order. This is because I really like to see my chronological progress. But, when I painted these an hour ago I just knew that they needed to be up today. And the reason for that (of course) is because it's Jim Henson's birthday! I felt like I needed to pay tribute to the man who so much changed my childhood and the world. From thumb to pinky:
Gonzo
Kermit
Miss Piggy
Fozzie
Beaker (my favorite)

The background is Milani's 3d holographic in Hi-Tech and the right hand says "Muppets" (which hopefully is obvious...)

NOTE: Design for Kermit was created by Leslie at Polish Art Addiction. She had an awesome tutorial for him there and I knew I couldn't top her design!