Late Halloween Fun

 These are some pictures that I wanted to share with you guys, but I I'll admit I was too lazy to get together since they were in different files. Well, I finally have them all together and thought I would share anyway. It's Friday, so yay, we need some fun to start out our day!

This was a quick mani I did in October. The accent nail is Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Sun Kissed and the rest are Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Black Out.

This is a haunted gingerbread house that we made as a family, and by family I mean me and my husband. The kids were too busy watching Hocus Pocus for their first time and I'm glad to say they loved it as much as I did when I first saw it! At least they enjoyed eating the leftover candy.

The side of the house, I think my husband did a pretty good job with the spiderweb!

These are my kids. My son went as Bumble Bee and my daughter went as a princess, but this was actually her second costume of the day. She was dressed as Batgirl before this. She actually let me do her makeup and nails! I was pretty excited about that because she has some GREAT eyelashes. Yup, I'm jealous.

Here are her nails. She became pretty frustrated at the end and didn't let me do proper cleanup, but they were ok for one night of fun.

 Sorry, I was late with this post but hope you enjoyed anyways! ^_^

A Halloween Dotticure

 I have no idea how I even started doing this mani. All I remember is that I got it into my head to see how many dots it would take to completely cover up a nail. As it turns out, it's really not that many. Well, at least the way I did it. I have a set of dotting tools with five different sizes, so I started making dots from the largest size and filled in any gaps at the end with the smaller size. I used Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Deep Purple, Black Out and Sun Kissed. Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear's are my absolute favorite polishes to use when doing nail art because they are very affordable AND have a great formula. 

 I did this on all ten fingers and it took less than 30 minutes and was super easy to do. I was iffy about the design, but my son changed my mind. It was the first thing he noticed when he saw me in the morning and told me they were "COOL". That made my day, since usually when I ask him if he likes my mani he'll say "yea" without even looking. ^_^

More apologies are in place for this design. It's a bit messy, but not just because it was a one a.m. design. I am experimenting with acrylic paint and it's a little tricky to get the correct amount of paint and the consistency is a lot smoother than polish. I also think that I need some better art brushes for acrylic paint because my nail art brushes don't seem to play well with the paint or it could be user error. O_o I used Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Deep Purple for the background, the grey is Wet Cement, the grass is Going Green and the moon is Mellow Yellow. Only the black is acrylic paint.

 This was my favorite design of the morning, but I was too lazy to do it to the other hand. This literally screams Halloween to me. I don't think I'll be doing it again though, because it is too time consuming and I have over half my stash as untrieds. Maybe next year! ^_^

Spooky Water Marbles!!

 Before we get started, I want to point out that all these water marbles were done around one or two a.m. Sunday morning. I didn't plan on doing any water marbles for Halloween, but what can I say? The "artistic" bug bit me, or it could be that I binged on Lindor Truffles and had tons of energy. Either way, my point is that these could have been ten times better. So, I apologize beforehand for all the bubbling and smearing, since I didn't let the polishes dry enough before applying topcoat.

 Ok, so now that we addressed the elephant in the room let's get started! This first one was inspired by pumpkins, hence all the pumpkin stickers. I initially only planned on doing one pumpkin on the index finger, but I got a little carried away. It's a little busy with all the dotting and stickers going on. Though the colors are spot on for Halloween. I used Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Sun Kissed and Black Out.

The problem with nail art stickers is that I cannot just place a sticker on my nail and call it a day. I always seem to need to add to it to finish the look. Whenever I just put the sticker on, it looks like it's missing something. That's why I added the dots on the above water marble and I added a second sticker here to balance it out. Skulls have never really been my thing, but they are slowly growing on me. Here I used Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Deep Purple, Sun Kissed and Black Out.

I had this idea to do a Frankenstein design ever since the month of October started, yet I could never think of anything else to put on the other fingers. Water marble was the perfect thing to do. I added purple to get a little color in there, since the green and black by themselves looked pretty blah. My index finger is not indicative of a bad cleanup job, rather it was done on purpose to imitate the squarish head of Frankenstein. Yup, the line could have been straighter. Oh, and I added those little bolts to the sides of my nails. I always wanted to have a reason to paint something other than my nail! The colors I used are Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Green with Envy, Deep Purple, Black Out and White On.

 I would have gone on doing water marbles all morning long, but then we had a thunderstorm coming through at the time and the light went out for a few minutes. I'm a total scared-y cat. I'm thinking that I want to do the Frankenstein water marble again for Thursday's pot luck, but then I'm also contemplating on using my Connect the Dots. I love that polish so much that I want to wear it all the time and I actually have to hide it from myself to keep me from wearing it 24/7! I have a few more designs I came up with before I did my water marbling, so stay tuned!  ^_^

Getting abstract with ghosts!

 Another super easy nail art design! Like I said before, easy nail art is my favorite kind of nail art nowadays. I didn't want to spend too much time, so I decided to do an abstract dry water marbling. Dry water marbling is achieved by placing drops of nail polish onto your nail and creating lines or swirls with a dotting tool, toothpick, needle etc. In this instance, I wasn't going for any particular design, I just wanted to achieve an "abstract look". I did the dry water marbling on all my fingers except the index finger. I used a dotting tool to create the eyes and mouth of the ghost with Sally Hansen's Black Out and White On as the background.  The other fingers were done by using Sally Hansen Sunkissed, White On and Black Out as the background.

 This was the first time that I tried the dry water marbling technique and it was a lot cleaner than the wet water marbling. I have seen some really neat designs with dry water marbling, so maybe I'll give it another go. ^_^

Sally Hansen Water Marble Week: The Real Teal

 Today's post features Xtreme Wears in Black Out, Celeb City and The Real Teal. I have never done a base color other than white, but this color scheme makes me want to try it. Since I used white I had to use two drops of black each time I dropped polish in, and I should have used two of the silver as well. The only thing is I'm not sure how well the teal will show up if I used, say a black base.

 In the shade.

In the sun. My index finger's nail isn't bent like it seems, it's just that I didn't think I had enough silver so I tried to go in with the polish's brush and add some more sparkle. I wish I hadn't though, because while it did look shiny, it made the look messy.

Fail. This was the first hand I tried doing and well, I'll let the picture speak for itself.

 I also fudged up by using a top coat other than Seche Vite on this. Other top coats smear the colors into each other if they aren't quite dry, but Seche Vite is great for nail art because it gives you quick dry time without the muss.