8/24/11 - Back to School Pencil Nails

For back to school I attempted a pencil-tip mani. I thought it was pretty cute.
The polishes are Simply Sweet yellow, Wet 'n' Wild Metallic, Simply Sweet pink, and Migi Nail Art Pen yellow. The pinkies also have Claire's white and Migi black. :)

8/20/11 - Outline Crackle Nails

I wanted something fairly quick and simple. I have a back-to-school mani planned out for next Wednesday (the day before I go back), so I didn't want something amazing I didn't want to take off in a few days. xD'
The base colour is a polish I just bought the other day at Walgreens - Wet 'n' Wild black quick dry (I believe their name for it was Ebony Hates Chris). This a fantastic polish in that it is completely opaque in one coat, dries quickly, and is just a nice solid black. The crackle is from Cherimoya, and I outlined two crackles on each nail with a Migi nail art pen. :)

8/11/11 - Water Marble Ish

I decided to try water marbling for the second time. Much better than the first time, though still not great. But I won't give up on it quite yet..
The coat of sparkles on top is from my glow-in-the-dark nail polish from Claire's. I love it because it's thin enough to allow colours to show underneath, but it really does glow in the dark. :)

8/5/11 - Pastel Plaid Nails

Well, I hated the last mani I did with its illegible words. So I've been desperately trying to come up with something new to do. I've been kind of thinking of trying a tape mani, having seen some cool ones online. Then I looked down at my pajama shorts and inspiration struck. I would do a plaid tape mani.
Well, this was kind of a terrible idea, as it turns out, because it was extremely difficult. There must be some trick to doing tape manis I don't know about. First, I waited for the base colour to dry for over two hours, and the tape still messed it up a little. Second, this was essentially a six hour process. Apply base coat and base colour. Wait two hours. Apply bottom colour stripes. Wait two hours. Apply top colour stripes. Apply top coat. Feel too frustrated with having constantly smudged it to clean up before taking pictures. Dig the inspiration shorts out of the laundry hamper for the pictures. Glare at your nails and hope someone thinks they're cute. Sigh.

8/4/11 - Sister Mani

Remember the mani before the last mani? My first gradient, with the black flowers? Well, it turned out my sister wanted one like it, but using her new blue nail polish. Doing gradients is definitely harder when the colours are more different. I was worried she wouldn't like it since it looks more sloppy, but she loved how some of the mistakes I made look like ocean waves. :)

8/2/11 - Stash

I finally got around to taking pictures of my stash. The paper plate is something I just came up with - I don't have a fake nail wheel to do swatches, so I did them on a paper plate instead. It seems fairly accurate as to how it goes on the nail, though not perfect, of course. It's still nice to see side-by-side colour comparisons and such, so I've already gotten some use out of it. :)

8/2/11 - Fail Text Nails

Ugggh, nail fail. I had this great idea that instead of doing newsprint that showed up backwards, I would print out backwards words so it would show up forwards. I tested it out on a piece of plastic - success! But for whatever reason, it just didn't work very well.
These are all love quotes. As you can see, some of them are kind of legible. Most of them aren't. If anyone's really curious what quotes I used, just ask.