Saturday, March 10, 2012

Hunger Games Katniss (inspired) nails

This might be my first guide post, so yay!

"The team works on me until late afternoon, turning my skin to glowing satin, stenciling patterns on my arms, painting flame designs on my twenty perfect nails."
Her nails aren't really described in too much detail, but I wanted to give em a shot anyways. My initial idea for these, once I saw Chinaglazes collection, was to make a design using only colors from the collection. I also didn't want to do too formal of a design, didn't want anything too "hotrod-ish".
Here's what I came up with:

And here are the colors I used:
Left-to-right: Clear bottom coat, Stone cold, riveting, electrify, luxe and lush
1- Start off with your clear base coat.
Step 2- Stone Cold
2- Add a coat of stone cold. It's a matte, so it's going to dry really quickly. I really like that color, reminds me of a ashy sky with a lot of smoke rising into it.
Step 3- Riveting.
3- Pick a corner and add a dot of riveting. Wipe excess from brush and drag lines out from the dot in a "starburst" type pattern. (I didn't wipe enough of the excess and as you can see, it got a little gloopy. Remember to wipe excess. Better too little than too much.)
4- Go over the starburst with electrify. Wipe your brush off first- you want to use this polish just to let the gold glitter add some color to your fire. It's fine to go outside the lines that you established with riveting.
5- Add a coat of luxe and lush over everything. I really liked that, and using it over everything made me think of how a campfire will occasionally throw up giant chunks of ash. It also takes the place of a top coat.

The end result is a flickery red-orange, with specks of gold, and larger glimmery chunks on a grey background. My example on my thumb didn't turn out as good as my toes, but I'm sure you get the idea. Practice will make perfect :)

Step 4- Electrify

Step 5- Luxe and Lush
I would love to get feedback, and to see what everyone else comes up with for Katniss Nails!

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Hunger Games nail polish

I'm back! It has been literally.... months and months since my last post. Got busy, got broke, etc. Hopefully, this time around, I'll be able to keep up with my posting.

To start off: My latest purchase- The Hunger Games nail polish collection from ChinaGlaze. I saw the movie preview, then read the books, and then stumbled across the collection online and was blown away. All Lacquered Up has an excellent post with amazing photographs and swatches, and after looking through that I was convinced.

I googled. Most places were fairly expensive, with the entire collection running 60-80. That was pre-release. Post-release might be less now. Anyways, I found a place that sold me two sets for a total of 84- bigdaddybeauty.com. I'm thinking I might give away the second set, contests or giveaways. They had an awesome coupon that let me get another collection of polish, and brought the grand total down to only 80. Talk about awesome!

Hunger Games collection

And here's the other collection I got: A bunch of neon, slightly sparkly colors that smell yummy.