Sat-ART-Day Club DOES Dotticures with Nails Inc

Hi Goddesses

I hope you have lots of good things planned for the weekend.  Mine mainly involves watching a load of stuff I've recorded on Sky+ - Doctor Who and The Following.  Is anyone er "following" The Following ?  I've heard loads of good things about it, so I'm quite excited.

Today's mani - sad face.  Actually, that's not right.  Today's mani is awesome, but the photos are not.  I'm sitting staring at it right now, and I love it so much I don't want to take it off, but for some reason my camera just could not deal with it.

This is a gradient involving 2 Nails Incs.  The paler colour is Royal Botanical Gardens.  It's one of their newest shades and it's a deliciously icy but intense minty green.  It was also very nearly opaque in one coat.

The darker polish is one of their older ones, Reeves Mews, a jade-teal type colour that I don't wear very often.  Look at the bottle shot - it's DARK.  Look at the photos - WTF ???

As a gradient, this pair looked amazing, but weirdly, they also looked like the sea merging into the sky .. yes, despite being green.  Weird, but good weird.

I then dotted over them.  I don't yet have an awesome cream, so I mixed OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls with some Barry M Lychee.

Overall, this has got a really vintage feel - total accident, not planned.   It looks like something Cath Kidston would create, if she ever did nail wraps!

So, look at the photos, imagine the green a LOT darker, and presto, we're on the same page.  How annoying :/

Lots of xxx

Sat-ART-Day Club - Away With The Fairies

Hi Goddesses

I am a grumpy Crumpy this morning.  Beth has woken me up (which she is NEVER allowed to do) by squealing and running riot with Bluebelle and it's not even 9am.  My Saturdays?  They never tend to start much before noon.  Gggggrrrr.

Today's theme sounded so cute, and then reality hit - what the HELL was I going to do lol.   The obvious choice was the Red Angel Stamping Plates as they have "fairies" on them - unfortunately, these fairies look more like strippers, and I really didn't want to take that route.

Instead, I found a Red Angel plate RA-115 which featured a huge pair of bushy angel wings, and decided to draw my fairies *inside* the wings, with a wing collage on the thumb.    Clever huh ?

Yeh .... except I seem to have ended up with the scariest fairies EVER - they look like neon wraiths!  I think the shredded dresses, blank faces and windblown hair all added up to too much.  Sorry, they're not happy giddy little fairies :(

Technicals - the base is the gorgeous Book of Shadows by Cirque, which I'll be doing a proper post on soon.  The dresses and the faces were done by mixing acrylic paints, and then the hair ... argh, the hair.  Eventually, this was done using a nail art pen, but only after another refused to work.  It also decided to be awkward - hence the windblown hair lol.

So now that my scary fairies have spooked the crap out of you, go!  Enjoy your Saturday.  Lol.

xx

Sat-ART-Day Club - Amethyst Skittles aka The First Time I Used Acrylics

Hi Goddesses

And a very happy weekend to you!  Today The Sat-ART-Day Club is back after a little holiday, and today's theme is amethyst skittles!  Skittles, for those of you who may not know, is when you do each nail differently.

Now, despite all my purple lovery, I very rarely use the word amethyst, so I had to Google to get the exact tone right.  Basically, amethyst isn't purple, or lilac or violet, but somewhere in between.

Step forward Picture Polish Warning, an amazing shade, primarily a blue-toned violet, but with some serious shimmer going on.  It's pretty breathtaking just on its own, and you'll see it in more of its glory soon.

This post though, is mainly about Ooooooh My Acrylics Arrived!   As some of you know, I decided to take the plunge and buy some acrylic nail paints as they are supposed to be better for nail art.  So how did that go?  Same hot mess ....

Firstly, please step forward this heap of shit that I bought off eBay.  Do not EVER buy this product.  These are called "acrylic nail art pens".  They look like they have a nice nib and give great control - certainly the accompanying photo shows some very fine and intricate art work.

They arrive.  They don't feel like pens. They're cheap squeezy tubes, but ok, the nib looks nice.  You do a practice line - oh, ok.  Then you squeeze again, and nothing comes out.  Then you squeeze again and the pen does a big hot shit over your nail.  Yup, that's what happened to the middle nail.

The middle nail was supposed to have random lines on it.  The stripe from this pen was about 2mm high and 2mm wide.  WTF???  Instead of wiping it off (which I should have done) I tried to salvage it by spreading the blob with a dotting tool into this spooky blob pattern.  At that stage I thought it was me.  But then I tried to do a swirl on my thumb, and the same thing happened.  Paint so high you'd need a ladder to top coat it.

So, those have now gone in the BIN.   Then I turned to my proper acrylic tubey things, and this is what you see on the thumb, the index and the pinkie.  Advantage of acrylics - you can mix your own colours, so each of those nails features a colour I mixed, and then kept varying.  Pretty cool.

Disadvantage of acrylics - brush control still required lol.  So they're not a "quick fix" for anyone struggling with nail art, but as they are less runny and less gloopy, they do even the playing field somewhat.   The thumb had squiggles (used too thick a brush), the index had horizontal stabs with a flat edged brush (not bad) and then the pinkie had stripes (not bad at all).

The ring finger is topped with I Love NP Purple Stuff, seriously gorgeous random blend of glitter, and again, you'll see more of that soon.

So ..... I'm off to play a bit more with my acrylics.  I think YouTube may also be calling me.  Nail tragedy or nail success, you'll get a ringside seat :)

Enjoy xx :)  

Sat-ART-Day Club - Something Christmassy !

Hello Goddesses

You may have noticed I've not been keeping up with The Sat-ART-Day Club recently, a result of over-extending myself and the whirlwind of stress that has attacked me recently.  But today, I felt the NEED to do something ridiculously bright and cheerful, so here we are.

Today's theme was Something Christmassy and I didn't really plan what I was going to do.  All I knew was that I wanted to use Color Club Santa's Cinnamon, as I hadn't used it since I got it in a swap loooooong ago.

Now, sometimes I am stupider than the Prince of StupidLand and today is one of those days.  As I was painting my nails, Beth came to join me in the nail room and I asked her if one of the jelly beans she'd just eaten was a cinnamon one, because she smelt of cinnamon.  She hadn't ..... and it took me another 20 minutes to realise it was me lol.  I HATE scented polishes with a passion (crappy sinuses) but cinnamon is one smell I adore, and this hasn't grossed me out at all.  Phew!

As for the polish, wow, what a glitterbomb.   Not in a heavy layered way, just a subtly intensely sparkly way.  This polish says EVERYTHING about Christmas.

Super red, super glossy, super sparkly - you really can't go wrong.

For some reason, I decided to go with silver and gold as my accent colours.  Both are from the Jade Holographic range - Mystic Gold and Psicodelica.   

Originally, most of the nails were going to have the stripes you see on the little nail, but I STILL feel like I can never control a striper brush.  I knew dots would be in there somewhere too :)

What I didn't plan on was replicating one of the Christmas Trees from this week's Digit-al Dozen mani, but don't they work well ?   Most of you loved that tree the best, and I have to agree, AND it's easy to do.

After the week I've had and the events of yesterday, I just want to take a moment to celebrate love.   At this time of the year, more than any other, we should be grateful not just for what we have, but WHO we have in our lives.   Whether you get to hug them everyday or whether you hold on to their memories like angels, squeeze tight, and love hard.  It's the only thing worth anything in this mad and crazy world.

Enjoy xx :)

The Sat-ART-Day Club - Winter Scarves etc

Hi Goddesses

Today's Sat-ART-Day is winter woolies - hats, scarves, mittens - all the things we need to wrap up warm.

As we've just landed in December, I thought I would add a Christmassy theme to mine, so all my garments are being modelled by a Snowman lol.

The base is my favourite white, My Boyfriend Scales Walls and the other colours are all by KIKO -

238 Martha Red

310 Golden Orange

258 Mauve Pink

303 Beige Chrome

335 Ink Blue

Hopefully you can tell what everything is without too much explanation!  We have a bobble hat on the thumb, and a woolly mitten on the index finger.

The other 3 nails are all scarves, with the little finger focussed on the tassles.  The ring finger is a bit of a joke - sometimes, snowman has to have whatever is lying around, so this time he had to wear mum's pink snood lol.

Enjoy xx :)