Beginning with the Blues

Hello! Welcome to my first ever blog post!! Those of you who have come over from Facebook (re: people I actually know) - thank you! It's kinda cool that you're interested in what I'm doing and I thought I would spare the others from all the nail polish-y -ness. Anybody else reading - thank you too! I'm obviously just starting out and don't really know where this will lead, but hopefully it's something interesting to pass the time or distract you from whatever you should be doing (in my case, essays for Uni...).

Warning: This post is a LOT longer than I'll usually be posting as it's an intro-y sort of a post. Hopefully future posts will be shorter and sweeter. Feel free to skip the rambling and head straight to the 2 (yeah sorry not many) photos of the nail-ness.

I wanted to start with a couple of mentions of other bloggers who have in effect sparked this one. www.letthemhavepolish.com was my first experience of a nail polish based blog, as the site popped up on the OPI Facebook page and I had to have a look! Chris's manicures, nail art and beyond comprehensive swatching of polishes got me hooked - the nail art obsession began. After a while of checking her blog daily, I decided to broaden my horizons a teeny bit and stumbled upon www.chitchatnails.com. Oh. My. Goodness. The photography, the nail art, the creativeness... It was such an amazing combination of brilliant photography and comprehensive (and beautiful) nail art - another blog added to my check-it-daily list. As someone who's relatively passionate about photography I looked for and found the person responsible for such stunning shots - the blogger's husband. And yes, I went to his website www.warmuzphotography.com and spent longer than I'll admit going through his folio, and then onto his blog. Aspiration returned, and the need to be creative reignited. It's a shame I haven't figured out how to channel this into my assignments yet. Hmm. ANYWHO...

Right, onto original stuff! I thought my first post should be photos I took today, as I actually quite like them and feared if I started with anything less 'arty', y'all would run away before I began. The stamps are done poorly and I smudged bits in my sleep (I mostly do my nails right before bed - I must've drifted off quicker last night) but the over all effect is still pretty cool. I think so anyway, and it's my blog so neh. Pics!

So this is a first attempt at a 'dry-marble', a technique I came across on youtube while searching for nail art inspiration. The tutorial I found was this one, and I watched her Hunger Games flames one as well (here) and thought this would be a really handy alternative to water-marbling, which I LOVE to do but some of my cheaper polishes don't actually work at all. So for this one I used a cheap mini Miki polish - a really nice teal-y sky blue that doesn't have a name aside from 'NO. 24' - as my base colour, with OPI I Vant To Be A-Lone Star and BYS Drop In The Ocean for the marble on top. These two colours mixed together (when I accidentally over-marbled) actually turn into almost the exact shade of the base colour, which was a pleasant surprise and allowed for less obvious mistakes. I let it dry then stamped with BundleMonster plate 207 in BYS Black Satin, and added dots with a dotting tool to pump the design up a little bit. The stamp was a bit 'bare' by itself IMO. Finished off with OPI Top Coat. 

Messy cuticles but I did several designs last night before I was happy with it so I was getting tired and sloppy. It happens.


So there ya go, my first post! Thoughts? Questions? Suggestions of stuff you'd like to see? Please comment or I'll feel lonely =(. Or I'll drink a nice cup of 'harden up' and be fine ;-). Will try and get another post up sometime soon, assignments permitting! 


Thanks for stopping by =]


- Ally xx