A Spark of Autumn

Hello my beauties!

I know most of you are well into spring now... emerging from your wintery caves, blinking at the bright new sun, frolicking in the flowers, and enjoying the warmer weather. For some of us, though, it's autumn! The days are getting shorter, the nights cooler. I'm wearing flannel pants and sipping a piping hot cup of tea as I type this, and I have a pretty autumn-themed manicure to show you!

Sweet & Simple Sunday: Fall Flowers

Good day, my lovelies! Today is another Sweet & Simple design, and may be the last one for a while. I am moving soon and will not have a computer for most of the month of December while I get everything sorted out here and fly to another part of the world! So, posting will be rather sporadic until January. Please bear with me and my mini-hiatus! I'll have more time to spend on the blog once I get settled in my new home :)

At the moment, though, I have an easy but SO CUTE design for you. All you need are three polishes and something to make dots with. I chose an autumn-inspired colour palette for these cute fall flowers!

Mix up the colours to match any season, or any outfit!

Easy enough, eh? First choose your background colour. Mine is OPI Every Month Is Oktoberfest. Such a gorgeous brown/plummy shade :)

Next, choose your flower petal colour, and make dots in a circle of four or five per cluster, like so (mine are done with Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Mellow Yellow):

Finally, choose a shade for the centres--I used Soulstice Spa's Buenos Aires--and put one dot in the middle of each cluster to finish off your flowers!

Make sure to let it dry for a while before adding your favourite topcoat! I didn't wait long enough on my right hand, and some of the red dots smeared a little :( It's still really cute though, especially at a normal viewing distance!

Please excuse the small finger off in the corner there. I broke that finger when I was a kid and it's been wonky ever since, lol.

Thanks for reading! Let me know if you try this design--I'd love to see it.

I'm sure I will post at least a time or two between now and January, but I know I'll be a busy girl getting things wrapped up here and transitioning to the new place. Take care, have a great holiday season, and I'll see you for a glitterier-than-ever 2014! xoxo

Sweet & Simple Sunday: Autumn-Inspired "Oil Painting" Brushstroke Nails!

Good day and welcome! Today we have another look that's simple to create, yet looks really cool! I've seen it around the internet (on Chalkboard Nails and Gorgeois that I can recall), called 'abstract brushstroke' or 'dry brush' nails. I think the effect is like an oil painting, so that's what I'm going with!

abstract pile of leaves?

You will need a handful of colours that look good together. I used five, but I think the more the merrier! (Gorgeois used twelve for her neon brushstroke mani!) I wanted an autumn colour palette, so I chose:

Zoya Nidhi (shimmery red)
OPI A Woman's Prague-ative (shimmery burnt orange, bottle shown above)
Color Club Daisy Does It (shimmery yellow)
OPI Every Month Is Oktoberfest (shimmery brown/dark purple)
Zoya Ivanka (shimmery green)

First, start by painting your nails fully with the lightest colour. I actually did not do this--I used a nude base--and the result was less warm than I wanted, with bare bits still showing. I don't mind too much, but I think it looks better with Daisy Does It as the base. See where I tested this on a nail wheel:

there IS a difference...

Then, just take your other polishes--start with darkest, wipe off most of the polish from the brush, and make a few quick, small strokes here and there on the nail. Repeat with the other colours, going from dark to the light again, overlapping them in places so you end up with a lot of different shades as they mix together! I took a few "progress pics"...

 

 

Repeat until you are satisfied with the coverage and colour balance. I had to go over the orange a few times, as it was the most sheer (yet I wanted it to be the main one!), but it shouldn't get too thick. Remember, you are only using a very small amount of polish at a time.

Once you are happy with it, time to clean up! As you can see, it gets a bit messy by the end. I used a cotton bud dipped into acetone to clean up around the edges, and then a small stiff brush to get in closer. This is just personal preference--I like a fairly clean cuticle. Seal with topcoat, and you're done! (I chose Seche Vite topcoat.)

Shiny!

I like how this has such a painterly effect. Reminds me of those heavily-textured oil paintings. :)

The thumb.. I like this one best.

I hope you enjoyed this post, and that you'll give the design a try! See you next time xoxo

Autumn Tree Nail Art

Hello, gorgeous!

Autumn is here! This is my favourite season. I love scarves, and hoodies, and pumpkin-flavoured everything, and crisp cool air, and crunchy leaves, and colours, and NFL, and wearing cute figure-flattering pea-coats, and and and pretty much everything :D

I almost forgot the most important thing--rich fall nail polish colours!

Today I have a manicure that I've been wanting to do since last winter, actually. I saw Gina's video tutorial of a beautiful autumn tree design--her friend Lo created it and she was given permission to do it as well and show us all on YouTube! My tree is a bit different, but I still very much like it:

I really need to do more designs that span all the nails. It's so cute :D

The background for this tree design is Essie Bikini So Teeny--sweet pale blue with a subtle shimmer. Despite being very soft and sheer-looking, it only takes two coats for opacity.

I then used acrylic paints in red, green, yellow, and blue to create the tree. Mixed them all to make the brown for the tree trunk and branches, then made a sort of burnt orange. I had a little dab of pure red, yellow, green, and then the orange all on my palette, and just dipped my small brush in them back and forth to dab on the leaves. Sometimes I would use the pure colour, but mostly I tried to dip it in one and then another to make multicoloured leaves. No two are quite the same! I love when a single leaf will have multiple colours, like this...

source

...so I tried to recreate that idea with this technique.

Sealed in with a nice thick coat of Seche Vite topcoat.

Here's a shot where I combine this nice fall manicure with another one of my autumn-loves: pumpkin beer!

Yum!

Hope you enjoyed this one! See you next time! xoxo