31DC2013 Day 4: Green

31DC2013 Day 4: Green leaves! What's greener than leaves & also saving the trees is a very "green" state of being, so I had to do leaves! Direct & straight to the point.

Inspiration (i do not own this picture, found on pinterest)

Brush stroke feather technique

Once again I have found inspiration from this site Pshiiit, the site is in french but the universal language of art in undeniable, the 'force' is truly strong with this one! Using a flat brush you can mimic the look of the very popular feather nail art you see all over the place, & the best part...no birds are harmed in the creation of this art.

I used Zoya Neely as my base, China Glaze QT to make the pink feather brush strokes & white paint for the dots.

indoor light

edited with a film in picassa

Where in the World Challenge: Colombia

#20 Colombia: There are 2 things that stand out to me about Colombia: for one, they have the legend of El Dorado & secondly they are know for being responsible for more than 60% of the World's Emeralds. Why do I love this? Well, I'm born in the month of May so emerald is my birthstone & El Dorado? well, who doesn't love a legend about a city of gold, what an awesome treasure hunt that would be!

So I thought a combination of gold & emerald would make a beautiful mani, what do you think?

I used OPI's Goldeneye & Nubar Greener to get this very simple but very gorgeous color combo look:

Valentine's hearts

I will be out of town on a Cruise for Valentine's this year, WOOHOO!!!! So I will not have the usual time to post any romantic nail art on V-day, so I figured I'll post a couple of designs here to get us all in the mood for "L'Amore"!

First, we have some little hearts on top of Butter London Two Fingered Salute:

Secondly, I alternated painting black & white polish, then used pink & black acrylic paint to make this cute design I had found on Pinterest:

Where in the World Challenge: Hungary

#11, Hungary: I was struggling with this a bit, I don't know much about Hungary so I really had to rely on Google searches &/or looking at what the other ladies had come up with. Mandy, from Chameleon Stampede had found out that a Hungarian physicist is responsible for the HOLOGRAPHIC method, and here I quote from Wikipedia: "The Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor (Hungarian name: Gábor Dénes),^[1][2] was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971 'for his invention and development of the holographic method' "

Well, any excuse to use holographic polishes, I'm all over that! I just did a holo post a few days ago, but y'all gotta let me get away with another one so soon, pretty please?  So I grabbed a couple of my favorite holo's, Nubar Reclaim & Butter London Fishwife, and went to work. This is also my very first tape Mani  so it's exciting for me. I just recently bought some of that nail tape that I've seen a lot of other bloggers use, I found it to be a little tedious & time consuming. But since I've mainly been a freehand nail artist I wanted to at least try it out. It's not really up my ally but I'll give it a few more goes with some other color combos, so we'll see! Maybe I'll try using some regular tape & see how I like that, cause the nail tape was slightly difficult to control & tends to curl up a little making it hard to place.

Anyways, back to the Mani, I put Fishwife on as my base & Reclaim on top, it resulted in a very pretty & subtle tape Mani:

Holographic x3

I spent about 3 hours Sunday sketching one of my tattoo concepts; I'm hoping to eventually have enough money to do a 1/2 sleeve & have been devising my design for a few years trying to get it just right. It's a big decision & it's gotta be right. Anyhow, by the time I was done with that I guess all my creative juices had been used up because I tried several nail art designs for my weekly change up ( I usually change my design every Sunday) but was unhappy with all of them. Finally I just figured I'd wear a solid color that made me happy until inspiration struck me again. So I put on one of my holo polishes, China Glaze QT, & as I was putting it on I was inspired to combine a couple of my other holo's to make a simple accent nail. Here are a few pictures of the resulting holographic heaven :-) The other 2 polishes are Nubar Reclaim & Butter London Fishwife.

Nubar Greens for 2013

2013 is going to be a good year for me, you know how I know? Green is the fashion color of the year, emerald is my birthstone, therefore this is my year & that's that, lol! But seriously, how wonderful is green polish? I'm always finding myself drawn to greens, whether they are light, dark, bright or muted it's such a beautiful color to play with & I'm so excited to show some new greens I bought just for this.

First up we have a stunning Nubar holographic green called Reclaim. Wow, just amazing, so rich & full of holographic perfection, I can't stop staring at my nails. 

Next up we have another Nubar called Greener which is a deep emerald green, absolutely stunning, I'm in love:

LDTTWC, day 6: They don't make'em like they used to...

Yay, I'm so excited for this day of the Time Warp Challenge that Lindsey created, cause we get to look back on happy childhood memories & the simple joy of playing silly games that kept us entertained for hours. Imagine not having tv, computers, video games or even a bicycle growing up? Well, such was the life of my family of 7 girls growing up in Brasil during the 80's & 90's. If we weren't outside climbing trees, at the beach, or playing soccer, we were indoors playing a variety of indoor games such as; Lego, scrabble, snakes & ladders, pictionary & other board games. But I had to narrow it down & ended up picking 2 favorites to design for you today; Pickup Sticks & Jacks. Can you imagine getting kids nowadays to play pickup sticks, they would look at you like you were crazy, lol!

For the pickup sticks I used various colors as my base in white, blue, green & yellow, any colors would do. I then used acrylic paints in the same colors for my two accent nails. 

For Jacks I used Elf Innocent as my base & then used acrylic paints for the Jacks & ball.

White rosebuds, inspired by Rina

I was inspired by yet another Rina  nail art creation. For this design she used a lovely light mint green, I chose to use one of my favorite greens Zoya Yara which is a gorgeous olive green with gold shimmer.

Here is my version: