Falling Leaves

I tried to do some turkey nail art this past week for Thanksgiving, I really did, but I just couldn't get inspired.  I really had no clue what to put on my nails actually.  All I knew was that my bottle of Zoya Mitzi happened to be sitting out on my nightstand and I felt like I needed to use it.  After looking through my stamping plates, I decided it might make a good background for some random leaves in Autumn colors.

Zoya Mitzi is a matte finish and it seemed a bit streaky to me.  I needed 3 coats to get it perfectly even.  The leaves all came from different plates: Red Angel plates RA-118 and RA-121, and Winstonia plate W113.  Pardon the crappy cell phone picture below.  I just took this as a reference shot so that when I got around to writing this, I wouldn't have to dig out my plates again to get the numbers.  But I might as well just include it in the post.  

The polishes used for stamping were Konad Special Polishes in green, pastel orange, dark orange and dark red.  Sometimes I dropped blobs of all 4 colors onto a leaf, other times I used just 2 or 3 of the colors.  I also experimented a bit with mixing the colors with a toothpick on the plate before scraping.  But the scraping action itself would also blend the colors inside the leaf patterns.  

For placement, I just stamped the leaves randomly on each nail.  I didn't like all the open space between the leaves, so to fill it in a bit, I used a toothpick and added some dots using the same Konad polishes.  

This definitely turned out to be one of my all time favorite looks.  I wore it for the whole week, but I'm still a little sad to take it off!  

Autumn Pumpkins

Have you ever had an idea for a design but it didn't work out the way you had wanted it to?  That's what happened with this manicure.  Except that what I thought was a problem at first, ended up making the final design even better than my original idea.

The plan was to take a design from Bundle Monster plate BM-H11 and place green polish over the leaves, two different shades of orange over the pumpkins and scrape, then stamp.  I've mixed colors when scraping on other designs, so easy, right?  Well...not so much.  At first, the colors kept mixing each time I scraped off the excess polish.  It was annoying me in the beginning, but after a few test stamps on a piece of paper, I started to like the way that each pumpkin looked a little different.  So I decided to just go with it and try it on my nails that way.

When I was stamping my right hand, I played around a bit starting in the middle of the design instead and scraping from the middle of the design outward to the edges.  It took about 2 to 3 scrapes in different directions, but it did prevent the colors from mixing so much.  But as it turned out, I really liked the pumpkins with the mixed polishes more.  The pumpkins where the polish mixed looked more natural.  They reminded me of real pumpkins that still were in the process of ripening.  Some had a few green spots, some were mostly orange and "ripe" and some were almost completely green.  I think my favorite pumpkin turned out to be one on my middle finger, which was almost all green with just a hint of orange running horizontally through the center.

It was a reminder to me that not everything has to be perfect.  I was getting frustrated in the beginning when the green was bleeding into the pumpkins each time I scraped the plate.  But the blending of the orange and green polishes is actually what made me love this manicure in the end.

For the stamping, I used Konad Special Polishes in green, dark orange and pastel orange.  The base color used for this look was Color Club Mod In Manhattan, from the Birchbox exclusive Wanderlust Collection, which I purchased this past summer.  I have a design from back in September, using the whole collection, that I have yet to post.  But you can expect to see that uploaded soon, along with a few other designs from Sept/Oct that I had skipped over.