Orange and Black

It's been a while since I've been able to participate in the Challenge Your Nail Art facebook group. But I'm finally not doing a daily manicure challenge and have time! Plus this month's theme is Halloween and I had to do that. As an American living in Australia, it really is sad to not have festive celebrations. In fact, Halloween isn't celebrated at all. I'll just have to celebrate it on my nails and eat my own candy!

For this prompt, I decided to go with a gradient. I really do love them. I painted my nails orange. Then I used a sponge for the gradient with more of the orange and my black. The colours that I used were Bond-tastic from China Glaze Magnetix and my unknown black. This was officially my last time using that black because it finally ran out and I got a new one. Now I have one that has a name!

Then something sad happened. The beautiful burnt orange just looked brown. I did them at night and thought that maybe they would look better in the sunlight. That usually helps colours look like they're supposed to. Alas, that didn't help and I had to think of what else to do.

So I decided to do more nail art to make them look more Halloween-y. The silver is Metallica by Wet 'n' Wild Shine. It melted on my nails before, but I figured I may as well use it up at some point. At least I wasn't in the humidity, which is what I think did it last time.

With the silver, I added some spiderwebs to a couple of my nails on each hand. I wasn't as happy with them as I thought that I would be because they ended up too thick. I wanted thinner lines. I was actually happier with the first one that I did, my left index finger, than I was with the rest. Go figure!

An InLinkz Link-up

The wonderful thing about tiggers is tiggers are wonderful things!

Today's theme for the 31 Day Challenge is orange. I was sketching out different ideas for this month last night and I decided to go with tiger stripes for today. Then I took it one more step and went with Tigger!

These are the nail polishes that I used for my nail art. They are Jail Bait from Spoiled (which is an orange jelly, which I didn't realise when I bought it, but is my only bright orange), my unknown black, Belsize Park from nails inc, Lily White from Ulta3, and Summer Rose from boe.

I first painted my nails with the Jail Bait. I really dislike that this one is a jelly. I need to buy a new orange once I have a job and allow myself to buy nail polish again. I painted my middle finger white because that's where I was going to paint Tigger's head. The orange is the top half of his head and how I started.

The next step was to add the lighter cream parts of his face. I don't have a pale yellow, so I mixed a tiny drop of Belsize Park in with some Lily White until I was happy with the colour.

Next was his nose with the Summer Rose polish.

I finished off by adding some black outlines to his face as well as his eyes. I really need to get a black polish pen because I used my small dotting tool for the lines. I always use it and it is usually alright, but these lines had to be really skinny or it would block off the rest of his face. That happened at some points so I then had to mix up the light yellow again and paint over a bit of the black.

Once I finished Tigger, I added the black stripes.

An InLinkz Link-up

Fruit

I wasn't able to finish all of the prompts for OMD2 in time for the end of the competition because of that whole spending time with family, getting married, and honeymoon thing. But that's not going to stop me from doing the prompts that I had ideas for!

July 24th had fruit as the prompt. I wanted to do slices of oranges on my nails, so that's what I did today. It helps that I'm wearing a bright orange shirt today, too!

The polishes that I used are Jail Bait, Belsize Park, and Lily white, respectively.

I started by painting my nails with Jail Bait. I thought that the orange was just crappy and liquidy because of the brand but now I'm thinking that it's actually a jelly. It took a few coats to get it mostly opaque. I didn't mind that I still had VNL because of the overall design. I then started by art by making a smallish smudgy dot in the moons of my nails and had white lines radiating from it to represent the white stuff that separates orange pieces.

The next step was to create the white part of the peel. I wasn't too concerned if it was a bit transparent because of how an orange looks.

The peel of an orange is slightly more yellow than the inside, especially natural oranges and not the painted ones in most grocery stores, so I added some yellow to my orange. Then I realised that it was too much of a difference and I added more orange. It ended up being a bit lighter from the yellow, but similar enough that it didn't look too strange.

I thought that was going to be the end of the manicure, but then I thought that the white was too big and too much of a contrast. I decided that I would try making it look less bright white by painting my orange on top since that isn't opaque and you'd be able to still see the white. I ended up liking that a lot better, although if I did this mani again I would probably just add some orange to the white when I first painted it instead of as an afterthought.