Hallo-WEDNESDAY! - I'm Going to Let it Slide

Welcome to the spooky, the creepy, the gory and terrifying Hallo-Wednesday!

Every Wednesday from now until Halloween (which is on a Wednesday!!) I'll be posting a Halloween-themed nail design. A tutorial will follow the design, but will generally be on Thursday or Friday of the same week. :D

First up is EVERY nail maven's horror- smudged nails!?  Ok, so these are 'smudged' on purpose!

The inspiration for this design actually happened by accident! I hastily painted my nails (neglecting to allow proper drying time between coats) and then slapping on fast-drying top coat. This made my top coat of polish dry fast, but the others underneath were still wet, and thus very smudgeable! Well, I went to touch one lightly to test it for dryness, it smudged, and the sliding/melting skin technique was born. :D

Hope you guys like it! :D

I used:

Blood:

American Apparel Downtown LA
Barielle Unravelled Rust
American Apparel Hassid

Flesh:

Zoya Avery
Zoya Flowie


Basecoat: Cult Nails Get it On
Topcoat:  Seche Vite

It puts the lotion on the skin...

Poppy Extravaganza!

Today I have a design that I did a few months ago for the Rite Aid Nail Extravaganza nail art competition. The judges were Suzi Weiss-Fischmann of OPI, Essie Weingarten of Essie, and Julie G of Julie G Beauty. Needless to say, I wanted to IMPRESS. With this design I made it to the finalist round, where I was sent a box of products that I had to use to create a new nail design. Here's the catch, I could ONLY use the tools/polishes in the box. Unfortunately this did not include A. topcoat B. a nail art brush. I did contact the PR people handling the contest to make sure I was not allowed to use topcoat or brushes, and they said if it's not in the box...no.

The kit included: a set of 5 polishes from the Jesse's Girl Julie G line, 2 Essies, a NOPI red, and 5 Sally Hansen Nail Art Pens. I spent 4 hours. FOUR. HOURS. trying to make these products work. Sure, the polishes were all AWESOME. Unfortunately not many of them coordinated, and on top of that, the lack of topcoat meant that anything I drew with the nail art pens wiped off. After several failed attempts (every time I drew something I was mildly OK with, the pen would shit on my nail and make a big splotch...there was a lot of unparliamentary language goin' on that night), I came up with something that I wasn't horribly embarrassed to submit. This round was voted on by the public... needless to say, my design didn't win.  You can view the other submissions on the Rite Aid Nail Extravaganza site.

In any event, I was REALLY happy with my initial submission. I tried a new watercolor technique where I painted the shape of where the color was the boldest/most opaque, then dipped my brush in acetone and 'pulled' the color to create the other shapes.

I used:

White: Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear White On
Red: Nicole by OPI Red-y to Runaway Love, sometimes mixed with Zoya Arizona
Darker Red: Essie Blood Curdling
Yellow: CND Bicycle Yellow
Green: Essie Pretty Edgy, sometimes mixed with CND Bicycle Yellow

Black: American Apparel Hassid

Topcoat: Seche Vite

The OTHER design. 

I used:

Essie Merino Cool

Silver, Black, and White Sally Hansen Nail Art pens