31DC - Day 13 - Animal !

Hi Goddesses

I'm quite torn about today's post.  In my head, when Crumpet does an animal mani, I know what I see, and this isn't it.  On the other hand, before I got *suckered* into this challenge, I had been planning to do Animal Week, and I have 5 of those perfect Crumpety animal manis sat waiting to go - and I was determined I wasn't using one of them for today.

So what you've got instead is a freehand tiger pattern I did back on the only day the sun shone this summer, which I was quite proud of til Missy did the tiger mani to rule all tiger manis (HERE).

I felt that too many tiger manis ignored the white element of a tiger's coat, and that's what I really wanted to play up in this one.  I also wanted to show some texture, so 3 oranges went into this, not that I think you can tell!

So this has Zoya Arizona as the lightest orange, CG Life Preserver as the darkest and then a fabulous Flormar (JG453 - is that its name ?) which bears more than a passing resemblance to CG Riveting.

This is a bascically a sponge mani - random orange sponging - then specific white sponging to try and create those stripe free areas.  I then freehanded the stripes with - yup, you've guessed it! - my CG Ink pot.

So there goes.  Laurie's post is fabulous today btw - awesome, epic and all that jazz.

Enjoy xx :)

Stamping Sunday - HOT HOT HOT

Hi Goddesses

Today's theme in Adventures in Stamping is Hot Hot Hot. It's another example of "I know what I meant" but lots of other people did not lol - I guess it had more meanings than I realised.  So, I think you're going to see a lot of different manis today, from hot colours, to flames, to things that are hot .... :)

For me, Hot Hot Hot mean hot summer colours, and I picked something I'd been wanting to do for a few weeks - an orange to hot pink gradient.    The orange is Zoya Arizona (thanks Lyncia) and the pink is one of my most used, Zoya Dawn.

I sponged this on - but I'm really annoyed that my lovely sponge is starting to leave bits of itself on my manis - fame-mongerer!  I don't know if I'm letting the sponge dry out too much, but that's what the bobbliness is anyway.  I've also started painting the tips when I do a gradient, just to get that ultimate colour shift going.  Sometimes it needs a bit of sponging to blend it in, but I'm finding it works really well.

So yes, there's a lot of pics of the gradient - sorry, but it's so lovely and summery and I just want to LICK IT.  It reminds me of those fruit salad sweets mmmmm.

For the stamping, I knew I wanted to do gold, and I thought I was just going to stamp the sun on it, but then, as I was rummaging, I came across this pattern on BM03, which reminded me of the sun without being too obvious.

I'm loving how the gold plays off both of these colours.

Whatever you're doing, have a great day, and enjoy :) xx