Harry Potter and the Hogwarts Manicure

Sadly I had to do a lot of scrubbing with the dishes last night and my manicure from he picks my polish was completely ruined. I'm not talking about just chipped. I mean that some of my nails had more nail polish that came off than was left on the nail. Although I did like my manicure yesterday, I needed to redo it today. I couldn't stand to have them that worn off!

I had a hard time finding inspiration, but it came to me when I picked out my clothes to wear. I decided to wear my shirt from the Spartan Quidditch Bonanza (or SQuiB) which was an intercollegiate muggle quidditch tournament that I went to during college. I was a co-founder of the Hope College quidditch team and we were invited to participate. We got fourth place. Anyway, it inspired me to do Harry Potter themed nails.

These are the polishes that I used. Bonna Blue by Fresh Paint, Lily White by ulta3, Dangerous by Sephora (Singapore), Gold Fusion by China Glaze magnetix, Con-fused? by China Glaze magnetix, Push and Shove by OPI, an unnamed blue by Chi Chi magnetic, Force by L.A. Colors, Belsize Park by Nails Inc, and my unknown black by Wet N Wild.

I started by painting my finger nails each a colour of one of the Hogwarts houses. I painted my left thumb white for the logo and my right thumb Bonna Blue to represent the sky in Quidditch. I then put tape on my right fingers to give them a checkerboard pattern to add in the houses' secondary colour. I then painted over them.

While I waited for them to dry so that I could peal off the tape, I painted the snitch on my thumb. I did this by using the brush from the gold bottle to make a drop. I used a dotting tool a bit to thin out the drop and make it a little bigger. I also used a dotting tool and the Push and Shove to make the wings.

 I took off the tape and voila! (Although I did have to do some touch ups in addition to cleaning up.)

The left hand was quite a bit more complicated. I decided to look at the house crests from Pottermore. I just used one small brush to make the different animals. The Slytherin snake and Ravenclaw eagle were both really easy to do and pretty straight forward.

For the Gryffindor lion, I started with the gold. Then I realised that I needed to do the mane. I started using a mixture of the gold and Force, which I used as a bronze. That wasn't different enough to show up well, so I just did Force. That still didn't show up well, so I added some streaks of black. I also added black dots for the nose, eye, and mouth, which I'm not too happy about.

The Hufflepuff badger wasn't too hard compared to the lion and I actually really like it, despite my dislike of Hufflepuff since I'm a Slytherin. I first made an outline of the badger using black. Then I needed to add a bit of white. I didn't want to be left with big bright white marks, so I didn't clean the brush between these steps. Instead, I wiped it off a bit and dipped it in the white and wiped more excess off. This gave me a gray varying amounts of white that I am really pleased with. Who would have thought that Hufflepuff would be my favourite finger!