Some of my favorite YouTube nail artists

Ok, this weekend was filled with much whining and sleeping, but practically no nail art. That's ok, though... I'm finally starting to feel better, so I expect to get some fun stuff done today. I figured I'd share some of my favorite YouTube nail artists for today, since I get so much joy and inspiration from them! If you like me, you'll LOVE them!

These are in no real order, by the way. Consider it a random selection based on what I remember at the moment, and I'm almost positive I'm leaving people out. But feel free to look through my subscriptions to find other awesome nail art channels, as well as other fun stuff like kitties and science!

I am currently spoonless, so have some flowers.

An in-progress shot...

For whatever reason, I feel like Hurricane Fibro has blown through and seriously wreaked havoc on me. This might have something to do with trying to play Just Dance 3...

Not that I'm complaining. I had so much fun and laughed lots. But still, the poor blog suffers when I have no spoons! I definitely need to stretch more, and sleep more. Come to think of it, I should probably color more too, since it is such a nice distraction!

I'm hoping I can get some nails and video-ing done this weekend. If so, I'll have fun things coming up for next week. If not? You'll get more flowers, like today. This is an example of what I do when I'm hurting, both an in-progress and a "finished" piece. (I put finished in quotes because as Leonardo da Vinci said, "Art is never finished, only abandoned.")

I'm not sure when I started drawing roses this way. I vaguely remember seeing a black-and-white illustration of a rose that resembled this, and I played with it until I had something I liked. It's really simple to draw (if a bit time-consuming) and tends to wow people when they see them. Lots of fun, especially when I teach the person who was so impressed how to draw their own!

I actually started this page when I was at my friend's house. Her daughter wanted to draw a bouquet of flowers, so we were playing with this design. I drew her a bunch of roses in a vase, and added her name to it. Then I decided I wanted to draw my own!

After drawing the first 4 or 5 roses, I realized I didn't want to stop with just a few... instead, I wanted to fill the page with them! And yes, I carry all those pens in my purse, plus many more. Off the top of my head, I have 4 highlighters (pink, orange, yellow, and... blue maybe? Green? Ooh, maybe it's 5...), 10 ballpoint pens in rainbow colors, 4 gel pens (pink, blue, purple, and green), and a set of 6 glitter gel pens (pink, orange, yellow, blue, purple and silver). Then there are the assorted sharpies and black gel pens in various sizes, and the glue stick, and the scissors...

Why yes, I am an artist, why do you ask? :D

Yea. I need to go to sleep, I'm babbling again. Ah well... tomorrow is another day, right? At least, it will be if I get some sleep. Wish me luck!

I think I need to dig out my colorful marker set to play with.

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Rainbow Zebra- how to do the zebra print

Whew, I finally got this one edited and uploaded! Here's the second half of the rainbow zebra tutorial... Hopefully it makes sense!

I love the metallic sparkle of the left nail. It's sponged over silver, as opposed to the right which is over white.

I love zebras. They're cute!

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Another Fail...

Once again, I've got a total failed manicure to share with you today. I was experimenting with the Jessica Heavy Petal collection polishes again, this time going for a pink look. Unfortunately, it was a complete disaster.

I'm not sure what I was going for, but this clearly isn't it. I started with a base coat of Dazed Dahlia, which is such a beautiful deep hot pink. It's vibrant, but not too vibrant in my opinion.

I then wanted some texture to the background before I started stamping. I used Rolling Rose on my striping brush and added some slashy, stripey bits. I expected the Rolling Rose to add just a bit of texture and shimmer, but instead the stripes really showed up against the background! Not ideal, but I kept right on, hoping I could salvage something from this.

I pulled out my Salon Express stamping set to add some interest to my nails. I started with CND's Green Scene and stamped a swirly sun-type design on my ring finger. BLEAH! This just did NOT work. The green is too similar in value to Dazed Dahlia, so the colors meld into each other visually. No bueno!!

At this point, I knew I was basically not going to be able to save this one. I just stamped random designs from the Salon Express plates, mainly to see how they worked. I was happy with the stamps, I just with the overall design worked better!

Finally, I'll show you a closeup of my thumb... I think I went over this with the Jessica Holographic topcoat too, but I'm not sure. The sparkles are pretty, but this is just not a good look.

I apologize for not cleaning this one up, but I knew I was taking this off as soon as I got photos of it. Keep in mind, this is not a failure of the polishes. This is purely user error- I'm the failing part of this experiment!

So, help me out here- what do you do when you try a nail design that just doesn't work? Do you keep adding to it, hoping it'll work out? Do you say to heck with it before you're finished and take it off? Do you just shrug and keep it on? Leave me a comment and let me know!

Til next time!

Polishes were provided by the brand for consideration.

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KITTY! CHICKENS! MADNESS!!

This is Dusty. She is a gorgeous, long-haired lump of love!

I had the most awesome time last night. We went to visit a friend and her daughter, and stayed through lunch, all through the afternoon and til around 7pm! Craziness, but it was lots of fun. We played on the xBox Kinect (loads of fun, although my fibro disagreed!), told silly stories and laughed entirely too much.

Best of all were the kitty snuggles! Dusty (seen to the right) spent a while on the arm of the sofa next to me, and finally I couldn't take it any longer- I had to lift her into my lap. She stayed there for an hour at least!

And yes, for the record I am allergic to cats. I took Benadryl before I got to her house, and took another dose while I was there. My face still swelled a bit and my eyes were itchy, but it's so totally worth it to get kitty snuggles!

Rico is gorgeous, but uninterested in us at the moment.

Then there was Rico, the most adorable orange tabby ever! He's just as beautiful as Dusty, but he's got a slightly neurotic obsession... he loves paper. Specifically, he loves to lie down on paper. He was snuggling on my lap when he saw someone had put a piece of paper on the floor, and he actually jumped and ran to plop down onto it! So funny...

As you can see, he also likes being under the paper. My son got the idea to put the paper on Rico and he just stayed like this for quite a while!

Then my son decided to see what all he could put on top of the kitty. Turns out? Quite a bit.



Yea.We laughed our tushies off! Too much fun... I love his reaction at the end, like, "Whoa, what the heck was THAT?!"

And with that, I think I'm going to head to bed. I'm pooped! Later!

There isn't much kitty snuggles can't cure, other than cat allergies.

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Sketchbook update!

Join me again for a walk through my sketchbooks, looking at the various things that have wandered through my mind and found an exit into the world through my pens.

What can I say, it's crowded in there, and kinda weird. Ok, very weird.

I'm going to start out with my current favorite piece. I started doodling it without intending for it to get bigger, but... well, see for yourself.

This started with lips at the bottom of the page. If you look closely, you can see notes for the blog and a blog shopping list under her hair. I figured this would just be lips, because I doodle a lot of just lips lately. But then I added a nose, and it actually looked passable for once! But the nose needed something on top of it. There was a flower under the sunglasses, so drawing an eye would have been awkward at best.

So then I had a face, with sunglasses and a nose and some seriously-injected-with-lip-fillers lips. The face seemed to need something to balance it, though, so I added a headband slightly off-center for that pseudo-hipster look. My niece had colored the heart for me at the crawfish boil recently, so all I needed to do was add the purple band.

But she clearly needed more... the headband wasn't nearly enough. I started working on bangs, but didn't like them at all. I decided to start with some curls at the top right of the headband. Once I got to a certain point, though, I realized she needed a pompadouresque poof. (Yes, I've been watching a lot of drag queen hair tutorials on youtube lately. Why do you ask?)

As you can see? Her hair kinda exploded, in a gorgeous, taste-the-rainbow kinda way. I'm still not finished with her, and my biggest regret is that she's on lined paper. BOOO! Still, I can always redo her if I get the urge. She'd be fun painted on a canvas!

Ok, since I've got an absolute ton of photos here, I'm gonna tuck them under the cut so you can skip 'em if you want and they don't clog up your feed reader. You can thank me by leaving a comment! ;)

A video tutorial on doing a sponged gradient nail!

I got such a great response to the sponged gradient tutorial I did. Unfortunately, quite a few people posted that they didn't quite follow my steps, so I decided the best thing to do was to do a video tutorial! That way, it's clear what I'm doing and when.

Recording the video didn't take all that long, but holy cow did editing it take a long time! Thankfully it didn't make me want to scream or cry this time. I just need more experience editing, which is a good thing. That means you'll get lots more videos to come!



I'm also working on the followup to this video, where I'll show you how to add the zebra stripes. That's actually a pretty doable process, if I can get the energy and the time to shoot it!

Since I'm doing more videos now, why not leave me a comment to let me know what sort of tutorials you'd like to see? I have several planned, but I'm always looking for more ideas.

Thanks for watching, and if you liked this video why not thumb it up and subscribe? It would totally make my day!

Wheee, I'm finally enjoying making videos!.

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