Nail Art Lately…

For some reason, March was kind of lacking in the nail art department for me. I wore a design or two until it was disgustingly raggedy (by my standards). I don’t know if it’s a lack of inspiration or a confusion with the changing of the seasons (pastels and brights feel weird when it’s still less than 30 degrees on some days). Still, I have some to share!

This is a really basic manicure. I used two colors, OPI’s Sparrow Me the Drama for the pink and Sally Hansen’s Pacific Blue for the blue. I taped off a triangular area to paint the pink and then, when that dried, I striped the blue so it would all flow together and add a little something interesting to an otherwise simple design.

I forgot about these nails! Danny Brito’s Instagram is an awesome source of inspiration for me (and cute dog and Pyrex collection pictures), and I picked a different color scheme to pay tribute to a cool geometric design he did.
I had a lot of trouble with my cuticles this past month, so I think that was another issues. I just painted random triangle blobs of OPI’s Call Me Gwen-ever and China Glaze For Audrey  over OPI’s Don’t Pretzel My Buttons. (Don’t you love nail polish names? I do!) Then I used my go-to black polish, Sally Hansen’s Black Out (the best, don’t buy anything else, it’s less than $3 what are you doing with your life?) and a striping blush to do random triangular outlines.
I would definitely try something like this again.

This is a fairly proud nail moment for me. As I mentioned, I am obsessed with Target’s One Spot stationery. The great thing about the beautiful color schemes and designs is that they serve as inspiration for other things…like nail art!
This abstract floral design was so much fun and 100% accomplished just by looking at the pencil and blobbing things together. It’s not perfect, but that’s what makes it look so cool. Base is Sally Hansen Pacific Blue, flowers are Sally Hansen Peach of Cake with a dot of Essie’s Good as Gold, basic Wet N Wild white polish for leaves and stems.

After a spell of boring one polish manis that were on my nails way too long (I don’t care if the colors were pretty, no), I was inspired by a light stripey design by Mr. Candiipants (a revelation I tell you!). She hadn’t made the tutorial so I just went for it with this. She liked it on Instagram, so that’s all I care about. You can see the sadness around my nails, the dryness and blah. I used Fresh Paint Coconut for the base and the stripes were Fresh Paint Pistachio, Butter London Artful Dodger and Essie’s Go Ginza!

I attempted the Rifle Paper Co. nail tutorial by The Beauty Department and, while I got compliments on this, I wasn’t satisfied. I am gonna say this right now: The tutorial sucks butt. It’s pictures, step-by-step, and that’s not a bad thing…but the painting was done on paper, not nails. It should be on nails. So I see what this stuff looks like on nails. There is one photo of the designs on the nails, but they look different from the step by step and have some added flourish that I couldn’t fit in from trying to do the danged tutorial. Some of the flowers could’ve been bigger (pointer) and some should’ve been smaller. They threw a disclaimer in there that they would look different on the hand…but that’s exactly why they should’ve used someone’s hand for the tutorial. Not paper. Sheesh. Too many colors to name. Sorry.
And next time I try to master an Anna Bond look, I will be using a notebook or design from the internet instead.

The last nails of the month were my beloved works of art (yeah they aren’t perfect, no I don’t care) in honor of the finale of How I Met Your Mother (still doesn’t feel real, maybe that’s a good thing). I won’t go into detail about the
19 different polishes I used, but I can tell you each thing.
Top L-R: Suit Up! is one of Barney’s catchphrases. A suit was necessary. The (danged) blue French horn from the pilot episode and throughout the relationship of Ted and Robin, the mother’s yellow umbrella, and a heart because…love.
Bottom L-R: A very faint (so faint you can’t see it!) acid wash look with a sparkly star for Robin Sparkles, the ducky tie, an M for Maclaren’s Pub, the pineapple of the pineapple incident, and a butterfly wing for Ted’s drunken tattoo.

And that’s all there is! Looking back, there wasn’t that much of a drought, but it felt like one to me.
Can’t wait to keep busting that rut!