Out of My Comfort Zone

Nail art, especially freehand nail art, is something I keep saying I want to spend more time on, but when I have a chunk of hours to play with my polishes, I almost always do other things that I'm more comfortable doing, like swatching and layering and comparing. But when I did the comps I showed Friday, I managed to ignore the voice in my head that said when I was done with those, I should move on to swatching another collection because that would for sure go well and be a good blog post. Instead, I left the blue comparison swatches on my hand and grabbed some of my rarely used nail art stripers and a purple creme to make a garden on my fingers. Somehow starting with the mismatched base colors made it easier to play, like if I messed up and ended up with nothing I wanted to show the world, at least I wouldn't have wasted the time putting on a base color. I know, it seems like goofy reasoning, but if that's what it takes, okay.

So I had China Glaze Sea Spray, Cult Nails Princess, and Butter London Lady Muck as my sky. I pulled out the only three green stripers I own to use for leaves: LA Colors Art Deco Bright Green, Kiss Nail Art Paint Beach Green, and LA Colors Art Deco Green Glitter. For my flowers, I chose Finger Paints Pop Art Purple.



My inspiration was the design Maria did in her Small Yellow Spring Flowers post. Here's how my version turned out (with topcoat, because I had the idea that would sort of meld the elements together):





I didn't have my computer up at the time I was doing this (and reading blog posts on my phone is too hard on my eyes), so I worked from memory. I would like to say that's the reason my interpretation doesn't have as much detail as Maria's original (no clouds, no shimmery highlights on my flowers, fewer flowers altogether in part because my dots are not so small), but I think it's more that I'll need a lot more practice to be able to work so much into one design as she routinely does. Still, my garden was fun to look at, and the flowers even coordinated with the dress I was wearing that day.



I can't promise new nail art every week, but I do hope to bypass that voice, the "better to swatch than possibly waste time making bad art" one, more often, because it's fun to see what happens.

ColorPhase Mystery Polish

Just a short post today because I am exhausted from working at my employer's user conference the last three days. Being pleasant and helpful and chatty for that many hours a day was quite tiring for me; I do much better holed up in my office typing code all day. By tomorrow perhaps I will have recovered enough to sort out and process the display photos I didn't get to last week. You may remember the Color Phase dumbbell bottles from my last display post; today I've got swatches of the one I bought to try, a silvery lilac that has no name that I could find looking at the bottle (I did find these are from Styli Style). The colored polish was quite opaque, a tad brushstrokey, and more silver than I thought it would be based on looking at it in the bottle. The clear top coat on the other end turned the color into a much brighter lilac and softened the appearance of the brushstrokes. The brush in the color end is a normal polish brush; the one in the top coat end is much more skinny, along the lines of a nail art brush, which made it easy to make stripes on two of my nails.







If you think the bright lilac on my index finger doesn't look the same as on the other nails, you're right. On that nail, I used OPI RapidDry top coat, and the color still changed. So the magic here is in the color, not the clear. That opens up the possibility of having more fun experimenting, but also means using top coat is right out. If I'd put the OPI RapidDry on top of my stripes to extend the wear time, they would have disappeared. Here are the two solid nails side by side, OPI topcoat on the left, ColorPhase clear on the right.



This is definitely a novelty item, but I had enough fun with it that I might go back for a couple other colors. Speaking of other colors of these, entirely coincidentally The PolishAholic swatched one for her entry today. The one she got has a very nice shimmer to it, not at all brushstrokey. Maybe I'll look for that one next time I'm at Rite Aid.

Sinful Colors Holiday 2011

Thanks to my friend Lucy, who lets me play with her promotional samples before I forward them on to her, I had the chance to try all the polishes in the Sinful Colors holiday display for 2001, called Wish.



There are two nail art colors: Fashionista (far left) is a silver glitter and Flower Girl (far right) is a gold shimmer. The polishes in between are Daddy's Girl (deep purple shimmer), Midnight Blue (blue shimmer), Out of This World (silver white shimmer), Sugar Sugar (red shimmer), and Last Chance (deep green creme). I already had Daddy's Girl, Sugar Sugar, and Last Chance in my stash, so they are re-promotes, but I'm not sure about the others.

I started my swatching with one of the colors, I didn't already have, Midnight Blue. This is a royal blue with very fine shimmer particles. I used two coats here, no topcoat.





I then added dots with Out of This World. My vision was that the dots would be like snow falling down into drifts on my tips, but my skills were not quite up to the task (the snow on my middle finger, for instance, appears to be falling in some wonky formation, and some of my dots are donuts). I hope you can see how packed with silver shimmer the polish is, though.





Sugar Sugar seemed the the most festive of the remaining polishes, so I put that on next. It's a pretty red shimmer with a bit more pop to it than Midnight Blue. This is two coats plus topcoat.





To decorate Sugar Sugar, I chose the Flower Girl nail art striper and attempted to make a design that looked like a Christmas tree ornament, the shiny ball kind with hand painted motifs like my Grandmother had on her tree. I don't have a lot of practice using stripers, so I had trouble gauging how much polish to load on the brush and how much pressure to apply when making my lines. I also tried to use the thin and floppy striper brush as a dottting tool, which was perhaps not the best idea. I added topcoat to at least level out the layers somewhat. As with the snowdrifts, I think the idea is fine, just the operator needs more training.





Sinful Colors polishes (regular and nail art both) retail for $1.99. Around here, I see them at Meijer, Rite Aid, and Walgreens.

The polishes shown in this entry were provided free for review purposes. The content of the entry was not dictated by the provider.