After the Rain...

If you've been reading Layniefingers for long, you won't be surprised when I say I love rainbows. It's almost obsession, really. I'm fascinated by the color gradients, watching one color shift into another. It's mesmerizing, and I adore it.

Today's design was created using three colors of acrylic paint. I blended them on the nail, using generous blobs of paint and a very quick back-and-forth motion with a thin liner brush. If I had a video camera I'd show you the process, but... well, to steal a quote from my mother, "If a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his butt when he jumped." A coat of Seche Vite made the drab finish of the acrylic paints come to life and sealed them together under its glassy shine.

I  love this one. It makes me think of candy, or carnivals and fun carnival foods. What does it make you think about?

Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone reading this has a wonderful Christmas holiday!

Is it too late to ask Santa for goodies? I've been good, I swear!

I know this is primarily a nail art blog, but now and then I see something that I feel the need to share. I was watching a makeup video on YouTube by NikkieTutorials this morning, and at the end of her video she showed the jewelry she was wearing. She had the cutest cobra ring that wraps around several fingers and looks as if it's biting her index finger! It was so cute that I had to look at the website just to see what else they had.

It is so cool, y'all! Ydeltuyt (pronounced Idol-tight) isn't your typical shop. The about link describes how the shop came to be.

The YDELTUYT office is a home-based company created by a 20 year old student named Simone Zuurveld, and is located int he north of the Netherlands (Groningen). The idea started during (where else) a shopping spree where she could not find what her heart desired. She decided to get to work immediately and a new fashion dream was born.


YDELTUYT has been selling high fashion accessories since April 2010 and has been growing ever since. At first, the items sold on our website were only available for Dutch customers, but because of the huge international interest we decided to make this an international online shop and we now ship worldwide!

Isn't that cool? I love the idea of supporting small independent shops, especially if they have interesting merchandise, and OMG, is there cool stuff here! I had to pull a few favorite items to share with y'all!

First is the cobra ring that drew my attention in Nikkie's video. This ring is so darn cute! It's not your typical snake ring in that it not only wraps around two fingers, its head also projects forward to "bite" your pointer finger! I love that... it's weird and kind of edgy, which I adore.

Also fun is that it comes in your choice of finish- gold, silver, or black! I tend to gravitate toward silver for my jewelry choices. I especially like things that aren't typical, that you wouldn't find fourteen other people wearing at the same party. I think this qualifies! It sells for € 9,95.

Next is an absolutely adorable skull ring covered in an elaborate floral pattern with dark red gems set into the eye sockets in a pavé pattern. This reminds me of the Día de los Muertos skulls for some reason, and I really like the stones set into the eyes. It's dark and creepy but also fun and funky. It's really, really my sort of thing!

Again, this ring comes in your choice of finish, either in gold with clear rhinestones or silver with dark red rhinestones and an antiqued finish. Best of all, it sells for a whopping € 8,95.

Then there's this flower ring. Isn't it too adorable? I love the bright color, and it's so whimsical! I can see wearing this with a fun summer outfit, maybe for going to a picnic or going to the zoo. It just screams fun to me!

Like the other pieces, you have choices with this ring as well. Although they're all silver-toned, you get your choice of flower color- pink, yellow, or this gorgeous blue. They're all bright and summery and happy. Since they sell for € 6,95 you could get them all!

I have to be honest, though... I think this robot necklace may be my favorite thing on the whole site. I love robots so much, and this little girl robot makes me smile! I love the pavé rhinestones on the body, and the little bow is the perfect finishing touch!


Once again, it comes in your choice metals, only instead of gold you get to choose from silver or bronze. The bronze robot has little amber-toned rhinestones on the body, and it's so cute! And hey, it's only € 9,95, so maybe Santa could tuck this one into my Christmas stocking!


I hope you've enjoyed this peek into the sort of accessories I'm drawn to. I know I spent entirely too long just digging through the site, looking at all the different goodies that are available. I have a feeling I may be shopping soon!


Merry Christmas, everyone!

Happy Holidaze the eighteenth- How to take it all off again.

I've shown a lot of different nail art here over the last few weeks. I've done glitter looks, rhinestones, lots and lots of layers. Tonight, I'll show you how I take my nail polish off. 

I know, you're thinking you already know how to take off nail polish. I thought I did too. It was no fun, it was tedious, and if I were wearing glitter it was downright painful at times. The scrubbing of cotton pads against my nails would make my nail beds sore. When you consider how much I love glitter (and wear it), you'll understand why I hated removing nail polish.

Then one day I saw a video from Colette of My Simple Little Pleasures, and my entire nail polish experience changed. I tried her method and was stunned. I told a friend, who actually avoided wearing nail polish because of how frustrating removal was. I told another friend, and another, and finally realized that hey, most people don't know how to remove nail polish easily!

It's time for that to come to an end. There's no reason to hurt when you remove your nail polishes. Even glitter is easy to remove when you do it this way. All you need are two things: cottonballs and nail polish remover. Leave the acetone on the shelf, you won't need it today!

I use the large cottonballs, and tear them into small pieces. I can take off all my nail polish with 2 cottonballs, even when I wear glitter polish!

The nice thing is that I don't need an enormous amount of cotton for this method. All I need is enough to cover my nail and get it nice and saturated with nail polish remover.

You need to saturate the small section of cotton and place it onto your nail. Squish it down nicely with your fingers so that it soaks the nail evenly with remover. This will hold the cotton in place while you repeat the process with your other fingers.

By this point, you're seriously stylish. It's an attractive look, what can I say?

Then you wait. You only wait for a few minutes, but it feels like an eternity while you can't use your hands. I tend to do one hand at a time so that I'm not totally helpless.

After a few times of doing this, you'll figure out how to know if it's been sitting long enough. You'll be able to feel the polish wiggling under the cotton when you press on it. It's hard to explain, but trust me, you'll know.

Once you've reached that point, you simply press firmly on the cotton and slide it off your nail. The polish will slip right off with it!

As you can see, the process took off almost everything in one swipe, leaving the edges of my fingers clean and keeping any glitter or leftover color inside the cotton instead of on my skin. I fold the piece of cotton so that the polish is on the inside so that I can use a clean edge to wipe down the grooves at the sides of my nails.

Don't worry, it sounds more complex than it is. You're really just trying to capture all those little edge bits that didn't come off with the main swipe.

As an example of how well this works, I took pictures of a couple of pieces of cotton right after sliding my polish off. As you can see, the water decals I'd been wearing are still almost perfect, as is the polish in all its layers.  None smeared around, getting on my skin or requiring scrubbing to remove!

For the record, I used this method tonight to remove the new Milani One-Coat Glitter polishes. This was an intense amount of polish- base coat, two layers of super-intense glitter, and two or three layers of topcoat. The polish removed just as easily, leaving no glitter on my skin and requiring no scrubbing. It's made such an amazing difference for me that now I'm willing to wear almost any polish at least once!

So the next time you're faced with taking your polish off, try this method. It may save you time, energy, and even a bit of pain!

 

Happy Holidaze the seventeenth- they weren't ALL winners...

Hi again! I've shown a lot of fun looks of varying degrees of difficulty in the last few weeks. Some were more successful than others, but I'd like to think that all of them were decent. However, tonight I'm going to share with you the designs I feel weren't quite so successful- the fails.

Everyone does it. No matter what the medium, if you're working at learning a craft you will have projects that turn out badly. There will be cakes that don't rise, woodworking projects that don't fit together correctly, paintings that are unrecognizable. It's part of the learning process, and it's totally ok to fail.

However, most people will shake their heads and say, "Whew, I'm never doing THAT again." They're thankful no one has to see their mistakes, and they carry on happily. I, on the other hand, think it's fun to haul out the horrible projects, the ones that make people say, "Good grief, Laynie, what were you smoking to come up with this?!" These aren't quite that bad (although I've had some that are), but they're still nothing I'd want to wear in public.

First, let's look at the humble snowflake. You saw the one that worked, but you didn't get the see the two prior trials that didn't quite work. See, I had envisioned these tiny snowflakes gently floating down from the sky, stark white against the evening sky. Unfortunately, my first attempt looked more like snowflakezilla, ready to eat the town and the inhabitants before letting out a large, snowy belch.

It wasn't good.

"HELP, the giant mutant snowflake is going to eat us!!"

I'm still not quite sure why it turned out so large, so blobby, so shapeless. I used a tiny brush, the same brush I've painted tiny details with in the past. But this time, it just got bigger and bigger, until it was... well, until it was what you see here. "It's ok," I thought to myself, "I'll try something different..."

I'm not sure what I was thinking here...

Do I have an explanation for this? Umm... no? I didn't even have a dotting tool at that point, so I used something I'd decided would work as a stand in. It didn't, really, as you can see. those are the wonkiest dots ever, and speaking of dots... since when does a snowflake look like dots?

I have no answer. I did, however, realize that this just wasn't working. I knew it needed... I don't know, something. Help is clearly what it needed, but no, I wasn't going in that direction. I decided to do what I always do when I'm not sure something isn't working:  I added glitter.

It didn't help.

Moving on...I also tried to do a plaid look. This one isn't horrible, but my color choices aren't the best, and I think I needed to try it on paper first to make sure I got all my overlaps right. All I know is that this is just not pretty.

Yes... it's definitely sort of plaid... ish...

To be fair, the photo is a touch dark, but I think you can tell that this just didn't turn out nicely at all. The lines are so LARGE! The overlaps are also confusing as heck to me. I'll end up playing with this on paper one day and see if I can come up with a better look once my new nail art brushes come in, but that's a story for another blog post. Don't worry, they should be here soon. :D

I also tried a Christmassy look using both red and green on the nail and trying to put silver scrollwork between the two colors as a divider. The idea isn't horrible, but man, the execution just failed miserably.

Poor, pathetic attempted swirlyblobs. You could have been so beautiful...

Can you see where I was going with these? It's a cute idea, with lots of shimmer and pretty and a touch of silver. But man oh man, it just didn't WORK! I can't even explain why it didn't work, but it definitely didn't, and when I tried to touch it up it kept getting worse and worse. This one I ended up cleaning up before I could snap a picture of it, so you don't get to see the silver bar as wide as the "scrolls" that I ended up removing! I bet you can imagine it just perfectly, though!

But I've saved the *cough cough* best for last. This one... I'd explain it if I could, but I don't even remember what I did to make it so damned ugly. It's black polish with gold glitter and more black polish. Lots of black polish. It's like an uber-goth Christmas. After someone's dog died.

♪ ♫ ♪    It's Christmas and I'll cry if I want to...    ♪ ♫ ♪

So just remember- it's absolutely ok to fail, and it's ok to paint a nail design so ugly that even brain-damaged chimpanzees with a seizure disorder could do a better job. It's only nail polish, and it comes off. Relax and have fun with it!!

Oh, and one more thing... don't try these at home. They're pretty icky. :D

Happy Holidaze the Sixteenth- Holy crap, there's a lot of these! I mean, let's trim the tree!

I have a confession to make. Because of circumstances this year, I haven't decorated my home for the holidays at all. I haven't even put up a Christmas tree, which part of me misses but the most of me thinks, "Meh, it's more work using energy I just don't have. Save that energy for something I care about." So this tree is the only one I'm doing this year... good thing it's a cute one!

Woo! A Christmas tree, complete with entirely too many ornaments.
I'm not sure how I feel about this one, but hey... it's a tree, right? :D

I have to share a bit of the process with you as well. This thing was time consuming! I think it'd go faster if I had some appropriate nail stickers, perhaps some sparkly thread to replace the sequins I used to make garlands. But if you're not a fiddly person, this won't be the nail design for you. What's worse, I knew this would be a design I wanted to make an animation for to illustrate the process. But this thing was complex. I sat down and counted (thanks to the counting tool in Photoshop) and there are 82 layers in all, and the animation has even more frames* than that!

So, how do you make this monstrosity of a nail? Well, first you get a chicken...

I kid.

You will need some supplies if you're going to do a nail like this one. Keep in mind, you can substitute all sorts of things, and you don't actually need any of the extra stuff I used. I just used them because I thought they'd be fun. So... what all did I use?

You'll need:

• base coat
• a background color (I used a beige and a glitter topcoat)
• at least three greens (I mixed greens using my base green and other polishes to darken & lighten them)
• a gold polish for the star
• a flat star cutout sequin thing
• flat gold sequins or glitter for the garland
• nail gems for the ornaments
• quick-dry topcoat (a must for this sort of design!)

 
Christmas Tree Nail Art Process:

1. Apply base coat.
2. Apply your background polish. 2 coats is usually enough, but use your best judgment.
3. Optional: Apply a layer of glitter topcoat over the background color.
4. Paint the basic shape of the tree using your medium green polish.
5. Using your darker green, paint in some shadow lines on the tree shape.
6. Using the lighter green, paint in some highlights on the tree shape.
1. These shadows and highlights are just to add some texture to the background tree. They won't be terribly noticeable, but they still add a bit of interest to the background so it isn't so flat.
7. Using a small detail brush, paint a gold star with your gold polish. You can stop here if you like, or continue on.
8. Optional: Place a star cutout on top of the gold painted star to add dimension.
9. Add the garland.
1. Paint a strip of clear nail polish where the first string of garland will go. Use a dampened manicure stick (or whatever tool you prefer for applying stones and glitter) and apply individual glitter pieces along the garland line. Apply them one by one for the jeweled look I achieved.
2. You could use a striper polish instead and sprinkle microglitter over the wet stripe of polish for a fuzzier garland look.
10. Add your rhinestone ornaments.
1. Dab a spot of clear nail polish where you want the rhinestone to go.
2. Pick up the rhinestone with your tool of choice, then press it into the clear polish. Press slightly firmly so that the polish slightly indents and rises up around the sides of the stone, so that it will stay in place better.
3. Repeat with more stones til you've got the look you want.
4. Optional- you can leave off the rhinestones and simply use a dotting tool to add ornaments to your tree. Glitter polishes (or even sprinkled glitter) would look fantastic!
11. Seal the embellishments and nail art in with a quick-drying top coat such as Seche Vite or China Glaze Fast Forward.
    

Seems so simple on paper, doesn't it? Actually, it is simple, as long as you break it down into tiny steps. If you can glue on a rhinestone or paint a stripe, you can probably do this. You may want to leave out the hand-painted star, though... *grin* The rest is just figuring out where to put stuff.

Remember, if you try this, leave me a note, because I'd love to see it! Morgan from Pass the Polish Please did an absolutely adorable version of my Santa nails, and it totally made my day to see it! So definitely link me if you try one of my designs!

Now, I'm off to have a cup of hot cocoa and snuggle with the husband for the evening. Hope y'all have a great night!

*Not that this has any importance at all. I love doing the blog and making animations, and frankly I've had bigger, more complex files than this. I just find it amusing that this particular file took me so much time. Do people really read these footnotes? If you did, that means you're super awesome and I love you to bits! You should respond with a comment saying something silly, like maybe, "Wow, that's cool, but it'd be even more awesome with a squid ornament!" You know, something weird like that!

Nail gems, sequins, and star were provided by Viva la Nails for consideration.

See my disclosure statement for more information.

Happy Holidaze the fifteenth- it's all stripey!

Today's look is simple again. I find that some of the most fun looks are simple.This green look could be worn just about anywhere, and is still simple enough to do at home.

I started with a base coat as always, then did two coats of my green polish. I added a layer of multi-sized glitter, then painted on stripes of silver polish. I let everything dry for 5-10 minutes, then applied a coat of topcoat.

Easy as can be. You could also jazz this look up with some rhinestones or striping tape if you liked. It's a fun look that takes almost no time to put together!