31 Day Challenge, Part 2!: Day 20, Watermarble

Since you know that my time is super limited lately, I was trying to figure out how to so a water marble mani is a short amount of time. At first, I thought about just doing an accent nail, but then I remembered that Bundle Monster has a plate with a water marble stamp and I had that plate (BM 320).

I started with a base coat of NYC MoMa. MoMa is named after the Museum of Modern Art. I only needed 2 coats for this mani. MoMa is part of the In a Minute line and dries nice and fast (I wouldn't say in a minute), plus I really like the brush. They are pretty cheap too so I really should pick up more of these.

As you can see, my stamping didn't work out so well. On the pinkie, I tried Konad Psyche Pink. The colors look cute together, but Psyche Pink isn't as opaque as I hoped it would be. I was having stamping issues so I thought I would try Konad Black with the plate. It sorta worked on my middle finger, but not really. When I was scraping off the excess polish from the plate, I noticed that there wasn't much left on the image. I tried the process several times so I'm going to have to guess that my plate isn't etched very well :(

Check out some other water marble manis below and see if they had better luck than me!

31 Day Challenge: Day 18, Half Moons

Today's theme is Half Moons.

I am not a big fan of half moons. I've done them twice on myself and didn't like them. I've seen some pretty nice ones by other bloggers, but they are still just not my favorite. In fact, I took these off as soon as I finished doing them that's how much I don't like half moons.

For this mani, I started with a base coat of China Glaze Cowgirl Up. I used 2 coats. Then I put on page reinforcement stickers to block off my half moon and painted on a thick coat of China Glaze Atlantis.  Atlantis is in a blue/teal jelly base, but over the purple it changed colors. I kinda like the effect that happened instead of just sticking it over a blue. While I don't like the half moons I did, I'm definitely going to have to play with Atlantis over different colors.

Sorry for the pictures with flash, but I once again had a cloudy day when I took these pictures. The second color is a bit blurry, but it shows the color more accurately especially for Cowgirl Up.

Check out some other half moon manis below.

31 Day Challenge: Day 15: Delicate Print

Today's theme is Delicate Print.

Ugh, not happy about today's mani. I couldn't get the stupid plate to stamp despite trying 3 different black polishes, two of which are my go-to blacks for stamping.

Anyways for this fail, I started off with 3 coats of Zoya Loretta. It's a super sheer pink polish that's perfect for French manis. I like using it as a base coat for "naked" manis because it hides staining and makes my nails looks perfect. Then I stamped used BM 317 and some blacks. Finally, I topped it off with Essie As Gold As It Gets. The Essie is kinda boring, and I have other polishes that are similar so I think I'm going to get rid of it.

For you (not) viewing pleasure, here's the one picture of today's mani that I forced myself to pick. Ugh.

Check out some other delicate print manis below.

Wet N Wild Grey's Anatomy

In earlier posts, I had shown you 2 other polish colors that needed to be layered in order to make the color shine. Grey's Anatomy is the same way. This is my least favorite though. The brush sucks. It's so stiff that the color is almost impossible to put on, and it leaves messy streaks.

Here's Grey's Anatomy looking absolutely gorgeous in the bottle. Look at all the color shifting.

Then it's boring looking on the nail by itself.

And here it is on the nail over black. The color shift is still nice, but look at all those damn streaks! Ugh. I didn't even more topcoating this mess and took it off right away.

Pizza Fail

For Day 4 of my food nail art series, I decided to do Pizza.  I haven't used my acrylic paints in a while so I decided to use those. Folks, my paint is too thin and I rushed this. So what you have is a blobbed on mess that topcoat couldn't even save. Here I share with you my fail, and plead with you to get quality paint and to be patient.

Nabi Magnetic Nail Polish

I saw this polish at Walgreens the other day and decided to try it since it was only $4.99. Ugh. It doesn't work!

I put down a base of the color, and it was completely opaque so I magnetized it right away. I held the magnet for 60 seconds and barely anything appeared.

So then I decided to put down a base coat of the color, wait for it to dry, and try again. Same result.

Sorry for the chipping, but I didn't bother top coating this mess.

See? You can barely see anything! I went back to Walgreens the very next day and returned it. I rather pay $16 and have a Nails Inc polish that works really well than only pay $5 for this crappy one.

Gradient Fail

I tried to do black/gray/white gradient nails today, and they turned out bad. Ugh. I'm posting a picture here so ya'll can see my fail.

I'm not even going to go into what I used because it's not worth it. You'll see some glitter on the pinky finger because I hoped that might help, but it didn't. This is my right hand (normally I take pictures of my left since I'm a righty) so sorry for the weird picture -- it's hard to use a DSLR to take pictures plus I didn't care about getting a good picture. I just wanted this off.

Any suggestions for how to do gradients in the future?