Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 23 - Inspired by a Color

The color I was inspired by was Riveting by China Glaze. I just love this polish and how it glows in person. So many people have done the spider webs, but I tried one out on one nail and loved it, so I went with it. To mix it up a bit, I put a big fat black spider on my thumb. My husband called while the topcoat was drying on my thumb and I smudged the poor spider's head. I didn't have time to fix it, so please forgive me if you can see his imperfections. He's still pretty cute, if I do say so myself. :)

With flash

Without flash

Have you tried out the spider web design?

Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 22 - Based on a Book

For Day 22 I went with "based on a book." Growing up my sister and I always read the book "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark." I believe there were 3 books in a boxed set, but I absolutely remember these pictures.

http://www.squidoo.com/scary-stories-to-tell-in-the-dark

The story I remember best is called "The Girl with the Green Ribbon." I remembered it as a blue ribbon, but it's definitely the same story. The girl falls in love with a boy and she is always wearing a ribbon around her neck throughout their lives together. Her husband asks why she wears it and she tells him she can't say just yet. Then on her death bed... well you can read for yourself below:

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/folk-tales?before=1347933543

I freehanded the girl with acrylic paints and as you can see, she has a blue ribbon. Oops. :) The base is China Glaze For Audrey. I have never really been able to draw people (other than stick figures), so I was pleased with how the girl turned out. Not as amazing as some other people can manage, but good for me. ha, ha. 

With flash

Without flash

Do you remember this story too? What other stories to you remember from these books?

Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 21 - Pattern

I am to the point in the challenge that I'm in a rut. It's to the themes that I've never worked with (ex. inspired by a song, pattern, movie, etc.). Who hasn't used a color for inspiration? All the color challenges were easy? I googled Halloween pattern and found this adorable pattern. I originally had the idea to recreate parts of the pattern on each nail so there was a bit of everything all over. Silly me, I had a mishap. If you haven't noticed, I've been doing one design on one hand and one on the other, that way I can burn through more ideas in less time. I did the last one (the violet ghost) at the same time as these. I painted the bases one night and did the details the next morning. After I finished the ghost, I realized I did the simple design with my dominant hand and left my poor non-dominant hand to do all the detail in this pattern. I am NOT ambidextrous at all, so I decided to make it a bit easier by doing one image on each nail.

I picked the devil, Frankenstein's monster, black cat, bat, and a voodoo doll. Maybe I'll incorporate the other guys later on (using my DOMINANT hand, haha!). 

Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 20 - Violet

These are another example of something that sounded super cool in my mind and didn't translate well with the execution. I received these two polishes (CG Ghoulish Glow and Bizarre Blurple) in one of my birthday packages from a lovely woman in my birthday group Momma Elizabeth yesterday. I saw swatches of Bizarre Blurple and thought it was nice, but nothing special. After putting it on, I was in love. :) And as I've said before, I will never be one to put up swatches to help people decide if you should buy a polish. I'm about the art. :)

My idea was to paint the violet base and use the Ghoulish Glow to paint an invisible ghost. Then I was going to work on my glow in the dark pictures. The first problem was that I put the GG on too thick (hoping it'd make it show up better) and it wasn't invisible by any stretch of the imagination. The second problem was that I can't make it show up in my dark pictures.

Well, on to the next one! :D

Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 19 - Pirate Flags

Flags. Are there really many options for flags that are related to Halloween? Not really. I actually worked two years in a Halloween USA store and I had flash backs to all the pirate gear we used to sell. I also had these nail stencils of skull and cross bones that I've been saving for months to try. They worked really well.

  

The SV on these made them extremely difficult to photograph well.

Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 18 - Tombstone Half Moons

Day 18 in the normal challenge is Half Moons, which conjured up a vision of a grassy hill with a tombstone. This is 100% better than my yellow nails day when I made my first attempt at half moons using those circle stickers.Other than the green hill and the blue night sky (both polishes from Catrice), the other colors are hand mixed acrylic paints.

I love the shimmer of the dark blue polish in this photo.

I really like these nails, but I think they're coming off almost immediately so I can catch up on some more Halloween posts. :)

Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 16 - Flowers

 If you're being picky, you'll notice that these nails don't depict flowers. Instead I chose to go with plants in general. My initial thought was to do venus fly traps, but then I remembered the plant from the musical "Little Shop of Horrors" and decided to try my hand with acrylics again. Here is the image I based my nails on:

http://www.skaneatelessuites.com/tag/little-shop-of-horrors/

The pink base is one of the Jade holographic polishes and it's gorgeous. The rest of the art (minus the brown pants and brown plant pot) were done with acrylic paints. The pinkish-orangish line on the man's face is supposed to be his beard, not his mouth, but my paintbrushes are awful, so it was challenging to paint.

 

My husband was in a school play of Little Shop of Horrors, but I've honestly never seen more than a few minutes of the movie. Have you seen it?

Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 17 - Blue

If I'm being completely honest, I did these as a back up option for Day 16 - Flowers. I was excited to do the Little Shop of Horrors plant for day 16, but wasn't sure how well I could execute it. I was inspired by the black roses that are common in Halloween shops this time of year. I also just received this Jade polish (the blue base color) and my XL stamper a couple of days ago and I wanted another shot with the stamper and an excuse to use the Jade. I haven't EVER been able to photograph the rainbow in my linear holo polishes, but this one photographed so well! That is why there are so many pictures. Normally I try to narrow down my post photos to 1 or 2 per design/hand, so this won't be a common occurance.

 

I definitely am in love. :) Although I'm nervous to wait until after I shower (aka do clean up) to photograph holo nails because it's so prone to chipping. Oh, and these photos are also with 1-2 coats of SV and you can still see the holo.

Have you fallen prey to the gorgeousness that is Jade holos?

Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 15 - Delicate Print

I have sort of hopped back on track! In the original nail art challenge, Day 15 is Delicate Print, so I went for a Halloween-ish black lace look. I used one of my fauxnad plates from Born Pretty for the gray nails and an Essence plate for the orange.

These weren't my best stamping effort, but it's rare that I get the fauxnad plates to work well and I was trying out my new XL stamper. Honestly, none of these nails were done using the XL stamper because I couldn't get a single image to even transfer from the plate to the stamper. Since then, I received a tip to use tape to clean the stamper instead of acetone remover (but still the acetone on the plate), so here's hoping!

What Halloween nails have you done recently?

Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 14 - Orange

Yay! Orange pumpkins! For Day 14, I used Day 2's theme: Orange nails. These pumpkins remind me of the stitching on Sally's dress in The Nightmare Before Christmas. It also reminds me of barbed wire a little. 

For these nails I painted the orange base on my tips with curved tops. Next I used a dotting tool to lay out the green stems. To add in the detail, I used a striper to create the ridges on the pumpkin and the stems. Of course I capped them off with a layer of SV.

What do you think of nail art towards the tips of the nails with a naked background? I find I really like it. :)

Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 13 - Yellow

For day 13 I decided to go back and do the yellow nails (believe it or not, the yellow is what inspired these even though they're more blue than yellow). My idea for these was to do a yellow moon mani with a dark blue night sky and stars. I tried using the circle stickers people use to label prices for garage sale items for the moon shape. As you can tell, my first attempt wasn't perfect, but it worked out WAY better than the one and only time I tried to freehand the same thing. I *love* this dark blue color and the stamping turned out pretty well. If I had had more time, I would have freehanded some stars and maybe used a dotting tool, but we were running late to meet a friend. 

Have you done the moon mani yet? Any tips for using the stickers and getting them to lay flat all over?

Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 12 - Red

Okay, so the red day is usually day 1 in the regular nail art challenge and day 12 is supposed to be stripes. As you saw, I did my stripes mani on day 9 (which was supposed to be rainbows). I thought this would be a good opportunity to go back and do one of the manis I missed during week 1.

I'm sure you've seen a similar mani before, but this is my take on it. I quite like them. :) Normally red isn't my "thing." However, the base on this mani is the red jelly from Sinful Colors and I think it'll be my go to red for full nails from now on.

 Have you done a similar mani to this one? I'd love to see it!

Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 11 - Polka Dots

For Day 11, the Polka Dot theme, I went with the idea of witches' warts. I googled for some inspiration pictures, but I was a little afraid what images I would see when I put "warts" in my search criteria. lol. 

I went with a simple dark green base (the same green from my fall gradient mani, believe it or not) and topped it with 2 lighter shades of green dots in 2 sizes. I tried to put them on a bit thick so they would form a bit of a lump. For that reason, these pictures are without topcoat.

I bet these could even go for pickle nails, if that's what you're after. ;)

Even though the base green is dark, it took FOUR coats for it to be opaque! I don't use it often, so I had forgotten this fact, but it IS  lovely shade.

I know yesterday was Day 11, but life happened, so the post didn't make it up. Don't worry though, Day 12 will be up right after this one. :)

Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 10 - Gradient

 These are my aforementioned fall gradient nails and I love them. Mostly it looks like I only used 3 colors, but I actually used a red (Essence), orange (Color Club), yellow (Color club), and green (Finger Paints) to create this look. I didn't do as good of a job mixing the colors on the foil before sponging them onto my left hand, but I did better on my right. That is why the colors are more vibrant on the bottom picture.

These colors also remind me a bit of Jamaica (red, green, and yellow), but these are also the colors of fall leaves. Either way, I find them beautiful. :)

Which look do you prefer? The more vivid colors or the more muted ones?

Jewli's 31 Day Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Day 9 - Stripes

Day 9 is supposed to be rainbows, but instead, I switched it out with Day 12 - Stripes. Last Halloween (before this blog was in existence), I did a beetle juice striped mani with owl accent nails and I LOVED it. So for the stripe challenge I thought I'd do something similar. For this mani, I did one thick stripe in the middle and a thin stripe on each side for my left hand. I had a devil of a time getting a picture of these nails glowing, so I'm sorry, but I don't have any good pictures of that.

These are the best I could do to sort of show the glow-in-the-dark effect.

For my right hand, I did horizontal stripes, one thick, one thin. These really didn't show up in the dark pictures. I have a devil of a time with my Wet n Wild black polish being thick and stringy when I peel off the tape. I've tried thinning it out, but it hasn't seemed to help. I also need a new clean up brush. Black is tricky!

I just finished these nails about an hour ago and I'm already taking them off. Ha, ha. Oh well. Tomorrow's post is already done, so it's on to day 12! :)