Monday, October 7, 2013

Valentine's Day / Halloween Skull manicure!

Since it's October and skulls and skeletons are appearing more frequently on nails this month, I thought I'd share the nails I did this past Valentine's Day (of 2013). It featured tons of skeletons and bones, and was just so creepy and lovely. I think this manicure could easily be appropriate for Halloween as well!

My 2013 Valentine's Day nails:
Thumb: Skeleton's embracing in front of a glittery heart, Pointer: skeleton hand, Middle: Ribs with a glittery heart, Ring: Skull, Pinky: Glittery heart
This was one of my earlier manicures, hence the shaky cell phone image quality. I wish I had taken a better image, but this was the best I could find of the bunch I took. I think you can still see most of the details of the nails. What you can't see is the matte polish I put on top of the bone areas to give them more of a textured and realistic tone. Oh well :/ 

In case you were wondering, my other hand had the exact same design on it, just reversed on each nail. 


What inspired this manicure:

For Valentine's Day, I wanted to try and do a manicure that was different from the usual cutesy subject of Valentine's Day nails -- I didn't want to do lips and I love you's; I wanted to do something more grotesque, that also told a story. 

I remembered a picture I'd seen of an archaeological dig site in Italy, from around 2007. They had uncovered a pair of skeletons curled up holding each other. I thought the image was beautiful and said just as much about love as any other romantic image. 

Inspiration Image. Credit: AP Photo
The closeness with which they hold each other and the obvious passage of time really tugs at my heart. My imagination wanders through what their lives and romance could have been... It was perfect for what I wanted to do.


The Layout:

When I do a really involved manicure, I have gotten into the habit of mapping out the layout on any available piece of scratch paper. This manicure was the beginning of that habit! 

My messy layout and notes on color!

As you can see, the end result did not differ that much from my original layout, save for some minor differences in color placement (see the thumb?). 

Making a layout really helps me decide on placement and color scheme of the whole design. I even swatch colors together on the paper to see if they'd go well together. I recommend this tip to anyone trying to decide how they want to do their designs!


How I did it (sorry, no pictures of this process...Maybe in the future I'll do some tutorials?):

Once I had my layout, I painted all the nails a tan / taupe base color. When that dried, I used a makeup sponge to sponge on a darker brown. 

NOTE: I had entertained the thought of using a texture polish when those types of nail polishes were first beginning to get popular...But I didn't want to go out and buy another nail polish just to do this design. So I improvised as best I could. 

Next, I mixed a custom pink color to create a rose gold for the hearts. I painted this on with a dotting tool, and finished them with a coat of glitter. 

The bones and skeletons started with a base of a very light grey. When that dried, I used white to highlight the high areas, and a darker grey for shadowing. Using the colors in this order helps to give the bones more dimension and shape. I added black for the eye sockets and nose holes. I finished them off with a coat of matte polish, making sure not to cover the black areas, so they retained their glossiness. Doing this helped to add further dimension and to differentiate the different planes of the skull. It also helped to punch out the heart on the nail with ribs! A very useful and fun technique -- I kept rubbing my nails with the bottoms of my fingertips, to feel the texture differences. 


Final thoughts:

This was really fun to do, and the reactions of the people I showed them to were widely varied and sometimes funny. Some quirked their brows, wondering at my sanity, others loved them, and a select few thought that they were really creepy and didn't want to look at my hands until I had something different on them. Hehe.

Thank you for reading!!

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Long-awaited Princess Mononoke nails!

Sorry for the long delay between posts -- I was determined to have my next post be Princess Mononoke nails, and I kept getting hung up on how I would layout the design on my nails. Luckily I finally figured it out!

I took inspiration from some of my favorite moments in the movie, and some inspiration came from cover art. As per usual, these took an insane amount of time to paint! But I think the time spent was worth it for these awesome pictures to be on my nails!

Left Hand: Nighttime Forest Spirit (thumb), Daytime Forest Spirit (pointer, middle, ring), and a glow in the dark Kodama (pinky)
Since the subject of the nails on my left hand are different but related to one another, I tried to create a sense of uniformity throughout the nails by having the background colors run in to each other -- The thumb's color bleeds in to the pointer, and the ring finger bleeds in to the pinky.

Side note: The Kodama on my pinky glows in the dark (if you didn't read the caption)!! I couldn't take a good picture of this effect with my camera, but trust me, he glows! I love him <3 p="">
Left Hand: Thumb close up
I was really happy with how the thumb came out on the left hand -- I've been wanting to do the Nighttime Forest Spirit for a long time, and I think this pays respect to the original design. The image was too small to do the swirls inside his body; if I had put them in, you'd lose the detail of the Spirit's body. So I chose to leave them out.

Right Hand: Ashitaka's curse (pinky), angry Ashitaka with his pulsating cursed arm (ring), 'Mononoke' hirigana (middle), 'Hime / Princess' kanji (pointer), San and her wolf brother (thumb)
For the right hand, I tried to be a bit more ambitious with the detail work. The ring finger is probably my favorite out of all the nails I did. Though Ashitaka's face is a little rudimentary looking, all the major details are there, and I think you still get a good idea of the scene this is taken from. The middle and pointer fingers, well... My hirigana and kanji are terrible, but I really like the title screen in the movie, and wanted to include it with this design. So please excuse their terrible brushstrokes! The thumb -- oh man. I tried you guys! Hahaha!

Right Hand: Thumb close up
I'm kind of embarrassed by how the thumb turned out. Granted I think fans of the film will recognize the reference photo, but man, I should have stopped a few blood spatters and line work from where I stopped! I'm still happy that I was able to get the image somewhat decently on to my nail -- What do you all think?

Overall, I am happy with the way these came out -- I got to paint everything I wanted to, and they all turned out pretty decent looking. In the future, I may revisit this theme and try some other layout. We shall see!

Thank you for reading!! :)