OMG this past week has been super hectic for me! After all the hoopla with the elf event and getting the giveaway ready, I still had to finish editing a manuscript that I received while we were on vacation! Now that's turned in, I feel like I can pay attention to some other things, like building a light box, putting together my jewelry organizer, and oh, I dunno, maybe doing some nail art.
I knew I had to do at least two manis this week, one for the LNHC and one for Doctor Who. The 50th Anniversary is coming up this Saturday with the premiere of Day of the Doctor, so I've stocked the kitchen for a Who-feast: fish fingers and custard, Jammie Dodgers, and Jelly Babies. Hubby swears he will not eat fish fingers with custard, so I guess that leaves more custard for me! The hardest part will be keeping him out of the sweets before Saturday.
Moving on... so this week's LNHC theme is Native Americans. I struggled for a bit to come up with something that would be appropriate to the theme without being crude or too intricate for my fat fingers to paint. Ultimately I was looking at my autumn colors and decided that maize (aka: "Indian Corn") might be fun and relatively simple to recreate. In addition, I did a lot of web searching to find tribal images, and remembered that my mom once told me that I have about a drop of Seminole blood in my veins, which is kind of hard to believe since I'm fair skinned, fair-eyed, and have naturally wavy auburn hair, but if mom says it, it must be true, so off I went in search of Seminole designs, and a mani was born. Here's my final design.
This was, by far, my most painstaking nail art for this holiday challenge. I used transparent adhesive tape to mark off the Vs on that middle finger, and of course waiting around for nail polish to dry is possibly my nail art nemesis. In the end, I'm quite satisfied with what I've done. Here's a closeup of the middle nail, side by side with the image that inspired it, via Miss Sews-it-all.
Colors used:
elf Yellow
Sephora by OPI Slushied
Rimmel Double Decker Red
Sally Hansen White On
Maybelline Blackout
I know, it's a hot mess. Even using SV to help seal things down only helped marginally because it's pretty obvious from the macro shot that my lines are not even. If I had it to do over, I would work pretty much exactly backwards from how I built this design, which was to start with a yellow background and then use series of cut triangles to layer the polishes from red to white to blue to yellow to black. In a smarter world, I should have started with black and moved up the nail, and then just taped off the triangle to paint the yellow over it, probably laying down white first so the under colors wouldn't bleed through. Lesson filed away for later use.
The easiest part of this look, oddly, were the corn ears, which I created with my handy dandy dotting tools. First I laid down the basic marquis shape in a muted taupe, then created lines of dots with the yellow. Then I went over some of the "kernels" with orange, tan, red, and black to make them look like maize. To finish, I used a nail art brush to plop on some "husks" in a pale cream color.
Colors used:
unmarked Oxblood red
Barry M Mushroom
elf Yellow
OPI A-Piers to Be Tan
OPI Chop-Sticking to My Story
Maybelline Blackout
OPI My Vampire is Buff
I almost wish that I could wear this for a while longer, though I would probably do something different with that middle nail to make it blend more for day-wear. I got two nice comments on them when I went into town, but this was before I had finished the "accent" nail and it was plain yellow (can I even still say that when they're all so intricate?) so I'm pretty chuffed about that.
Alas, because I'm trapped on earth in the 21st century, I have a finite amount of time to wear these because something bigger is coming. Whereas I know that people assume that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, when actually - from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff, I have roughly 48 hours to finish a Whovian manicure before it's time to pop the fish fingers in the oven.
Anyone else excited with me?