Spring Honey Bee Nail Art

It's been a crazy couple of weeks! I'm finishing up my masters degree, and finals week is finally drawing to a close.  All this time spent studying, finishing projects, and proctoring tests meant no time for manicures or even makeup!  What ensued were several sleepless nights and a whole lot of days spent with dry cracked lips and cuticles... and some scary eyebrows.  After a week like that, I needed some self-pampering to reset my system and motivate myself to tie up all of the loose ends of the semester.  At first, I was feeling a bit uninspired, but after a quick perusal of my stamping plates, I came across a honeycomb pattern and knew just what to do... a springtime honeybee manicure!

I could swear I cropped this photo at one point... huh!  Too lazy to fix it now.

I'm just a week away from moving all of my belongings down to Knoxville... just writing that makes my stomach flutter with excitement, and a little nervousness!  I've spent my whole life living in New York, and haven't been further south than Maryland (except for a layover in Charlotte, but I never left the airport so it doesn't count haha!).  Up in New York, it's been such a cold winter that the trees just leafed out (we had snow until the end of April where I am).  With the newly springy weather, the lawn has become polka-dotted with dandelions, and the bumblebees are everywhere!  Bees are such a sign of spring to me; while I give them a wide berth for both their sake and mine, I can appreciate the important role that bees and other insects play in the propagation of both wild and cultivated plants.  I won't write an essay here about the environmental impact of bees, but suffice it to say, they're fascinating little creatures!  I recently read an article about a book (I know, so meta) that was recently released by Laline Paul entitled The Bees, about a worker bee who challenges the hive hierarchy.  Its premise, being from an animal's perspective, brings Watership Down to mind, but as I've not yet read the latter, I can't comment.  I'm definitely planning to pick up The Bees when I have a bit more cash though!  Definitely looking forward to having some time to read again.

This one's name is Thumbelina.

ANYHOO.  Got a bit off track there, didn't I!?  My honey-bee inspired manicure was created with 3 thin coats of Julie G polish Canary Islands, which is a gorgeous, warm and saturated buttery yellow.  I stamped a honeycomb over the canary yellow with Sally Hansen Forsythia, which is a muted mustard with a hint of white shimmer.  I have had it forever, and I believe it is discontinued, which is a shame, as it's quite beautiful.  The bees were painted by hand using a very small brush, using China Glaze White on White, Sinful Colors Black on Black, and Julep Stella.  After I painted the bees, I accentuated the highlights and shadows of the honeycomb in the background with Julep Stella and Revlon Colorstay in Buttercup.

Some wonky bees on my right hand!

This manicure is so cheerful; from a distance it looks like little windows into a hive, with all the little bees bustling about.  I may or may not have worn giant enamel and rhinestone bee earrings to school today...

On a related note, I've been working on rehabing my nails from this terrible winter and getting into a cuticle care regime.  They're not quite there yet, but looking back at my spring dogwood blossom post, I think it's safe to say I've come a long way (with cuticle cleanup, too... yikes!).  I'm using Nail Tek II Intensive Therapy as a base, topped with Nail Tek Foundation.  While it recommends using the IT as a topcoat, I don't see much benefit, as it's not going to touch my nails, so I just use Salon Perfect topper.  Hopefully I can get some length pretty soon... more area to make pretty paintings on :^)

Vintage-inspired Floral Nail Art

I've been incredibly busy working on my final projects for school, but have been dying to do a real manicure for weeks. Today I happened to have a couple of hours to myself (rare) and decided that it was time... but I was feeling totally uninspired. Then, I remembered this awesome floral top I picked up at Goodwill a few weeks ago, and I knew EXACTLY what the inspiration for this mani was going to be!

The blouse is made of an ivory polyester crepe and is covered in half-dollar-sized coral-colored flowers that have bright blue-purple centers and abundant bright green leaves.  It's such a cheerful, springy pattern that I had to pick it up.  There's no tag, but I suspect that it was made in the eighties (just like me!  LOL).

With polish bottle for scale! (I can't help it; I'm a geologist!)

For this manicure, I had to custom-mix a bunch of colors to get the shades right.  For the background, I mixed a half bottle of plain white (L'Oreal French Tip White) with 8-10 drops of Julep Stella, a boxed-macaroni yellow-orange, to get an antique white creme.  I painted three coats of this over Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Hard as Wraps.  I then painted little splotchy rings of Wet n Wild Blaze randomly on each nail.  It's not the most pigmented polish, so I went over each one twice.  Next, I used a tiny paintbrush to add little smudges of Revlon Cherries in the Snow to the outer edges of the petals.  For the leaves, I mixed a couple of drops of Julep Roc Solid with China Glaze Budding Romance (my favorite polish of all time!), and painted little dashes randomly around the edges of each "flower."  The centers of the flowers were a mix of Sinful Colors Go Go Boots and Nina Ultra Pro Sailor.  I used a dotting tool to place a large dot in the center of each flower.  Last, I used a tiny brush with a bit of Sally Hansen Night Flight to place little dashes around the outside of the flowers and around the centers.  I'm not sure how I feel about the outcome of this last step, because it looks a bit messy up close.

Please excuse my ragged cuticles... I'm out of orange sticks, and I resolved not to use my nails as tools anymore! 

I usually feel like I shouldn't bother doing a crazy mani with my nubby nails, but I've been having such a hard time growing them out lately because of the horrible Buffalo winter, the stress and associated poor diet, and the fact that I have been terrible about my cuticles.  That said, I'm still really happy with this mani.  It's super cheerful, and from a normal viewing distance, it looks pretty good!!! 

Where do you find inspiration for your nail art?  Tell me in the comments :^)

Bunny Prints Skittle Pond Nail Art with OPI Sheer Tints

A few weeks ago I purchased the mini OPI Sheer Tints set.  I couldn't justify spending US $36 on polishes I probably wouldn't use that often, so I ended up springing (ha! no pun intended!) for the mini set (OPI Sheer Tints, Sheer Mini Hint of Tint).  There are two manicures I've been dying to try lately:  a pond manicure (see some amazing examples here and here) and a syrup manicure (here and here).  I've done the former here:

Please ignore my desiccated cuticles.

I've seen  lot of pond manicures that do dots or flowers, but with Easter coming up, I wanted to do something a bit different... enter, bunny prints!  For this manicure I used the Bundle Monster plate BM-424 to create the "bunny prints" between layers of OPI Sheer Tints topcoat.  Above, from pinky to thumb:  'I'm Never Amberrassed', 'Be Magentale With Me', 'I Can Teal You Like Me', 'Don't Violet Me Down', and 'I Can Teal You Like Me' again.

If you're not familiar with the concept of a pond manicure, it's similar to a jelly sandwich:  jelly/glitter/jelly; except triple or quadruple decker, and with light colored polish designs rather than glitter.  To make this design, I stamped little paws haphazardly and sparsely across bare nail.  I then topped it off with one of the sheer tints, and waited for it to dry.  I then layered more paw prints in other areas of the nail, and topped it off with another layer of sheer tint.  I repeated the stamp-tint step one more time (for a total of three layers of OPI sheer tint) and added one more set of paw prints to fill in any gaps and add another layer of dimension.  I then topped it off with a clear top coat.

Lefty.

For this manicure, I used the following products:

• Base coat:  Sally Hansen Hard as Nails - Hard as Wraps
• L'Oreal  French Tip White
• OPI Sheer Tints minis in 'I'm Never Amberrassed', 'Be Magentale With Me', 'I Can Teal You Like Me', and 'Don't Violet Me Down'
• Bundle Monster Stamping Plate in BM-424
• Konad stamper
• Top coat: Salon Perfect Top Coat

These worked great for a pond manicure, but I think they would be too sheer for a syrup manicure (unless you used like seven coats).  These definitely have a top coat formula; they smell similar to Seche Vite and Salon Perfect top coats and have similar qualities in terms of texture and drying time (i.e. glop it on like there's no tomorrow).  This was convenient, because the number of steps for this manicure would have made it a prohibitively long process if I had to wait ten to fifteen minutes before stamping each time.  As it was, I had to wait about 30 seconds.  On the negative side, it dried SO fast that I kept getting little polish strings everywhere, and if I used more than three strokes to cover the nail it started getting bumpy and draggy.

Squiiiiiishy!

Weirdly, I think my favorite color of the set is the yellow.  While I usually associate sheer, yellow nail color with stained or diseased nailbeds, the orangey-gold tone to this yellow translates more as "bright squishy marigold" rather than "witch fingers."  They are all pretty similar in terms of application, so it's really a matter of color preference.  In these photos, all of the colors except 'I Can Teal You Like Me' are represented pretty accurately; in real life, 'I Can Teal You Like Me' is much more of a teal (go figure) than a blue as it is shown here

Overall, I am really enjoying this mani.  I used this set once previously for a pond pedi and enjoyed that as well!  For the price (I paid $10.35 for the set of minis on Amazon), I think these are a great value and were definitely worth adding to my collection.

Have you ever done a pond manicure?

Bonus spring pedi picture!  Lookit my weird toes!