This Is Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Recreate

Aww. I've had such fun with this challenge and I'm sad it's finished. Man, October flew by. I loved this challenge and looking at everyone's take on each day. You ladies are all wonderful!

For this final day I had to recreate my favourite manicure from another challenger. There were a lot I liked, some I couldn't do because I lacked some of the colours I would have needed. In the end, I picked something that made me laugh a lot at the uniqueness of the idea. It's also something I knew would truly challenge me!

I picked Sonoma Nail Art's Zombie manicure. Her take on it was to do a Rob Zombie manicure. Awesome, hilarious idea!

This Is Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Trick or Treat!

I choose... trick. At first glance these little candies probably look very innocent and delicious. Have a closer look though.

Yep. Those are little skull candies. Have you ever googled "Skull candy" and tried to find actual candy and not a set of headphones? I have. It's a tough challenge. On the flip side, "Candy skull" yields Mexican sugar skulls. So I just did my own thang.

This Is Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Graveyard

This was fun! I think the general idea for the "Graveyard" challenge is more along the cemetery route, but that's not necessarily what I think of. A graveyard, to me, is less formal somehow. I (randomly) thing of elephant graveyards, unmarked graves and mass graves.

For this challenge I decided go more with the mass grave/unmarked graves idea by doing piles of bones. We'll never know who these old bones belong too, but they look pretty neat and creepy chillin on my tips.

This Is Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Witches

I decided to take a break from the creepy Halloweeny colours and looks. I did have some pretty neat ideas for some creepier witch nails, but this time The Wizard of Oz won out. Yep. I will never pass up an opportunity to use a polish that is impossible to photograph - like Ruby Pumps. I just like to torture myself like that.

For this mani my inspiration was two of the witches from The Wizard of Oz. Firstly, The Wicked Witch of the East - that poor dear we never get to meet because she ended up unceremoniously crushed under Dorothy's house. The only part of her we see are her black and white striped legs adorned with the gorgeous ruby slippers. The other inspiration, for my ring finger, was the kind and beautiful Glinda, the Good Witch.

This Is Halloween and Reddit double challenge: Gradient

AAARRRGHHHHH

OK. Now that I've got that out of the way, let me just say that this challenge has seriously challenged me at every turn. I am very happy with the result.. but man. It was quite a thing getting to it.

Today just happens to be gradient day for both challenges I'm participating in: The Reddit Laqueristas 52 Week Challenge and the This Is Halloween Nail Art Challenge.

I have never done a gradient before. Technically, I am so new to all of this that everything I do is a first. I am the sort of person to jump in the deep end though. None of this two colour horizontal gradient thing. Oh no. I think I'll do a vertical tri colour gradient! What could go wrong? ಠ_ಠ. Well.. It turns out the answer is "a lot". But all's well that ends well.

This Is Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Bats

This was a bit tricky! And I've been pressed for time. I'm going to a masquerade ball tonight (woo!). The colours I'm wearing are mostly silver and white. I've been very busy making my mask (Which I think is gorgeous. I'll post pics later if anyone is interested!)

So I had this conundrum where I needed to do bats but didn't have time to do bats AND then do a mani for the ball. I decided to try and make my bats a bit more subtle and kind of stick to my colour scheme.

This resulted in my idea of doing a bat sammich (that would be a jelly sandwich... except with bats instead of glitter). Then I added silver tips for some bling and voila!

I'm pretty happy. The bats look like they're flying through fog or something. It looks quite eerie.

This Is Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Zombies

Hell yeah zombies. I'm not a huge fan of fast, scary, used-to-be-my-neighbour zombies. But zombies of the funny kind are awesome. Zombieland is a great movie. So I was pretty excited about this!

I had a few different ideas which I drew on paper in actual nail size to figure out what was possible. In the end hungry little cartoon zombies trapped on my nail that will never get to that delicious brain is what won. (That was a long sentence).

This Is Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Jack-O-Lanterns

Oh my goodness. This has been very time consuming. I wanted to do something different for this challenge. During my search for inspiration (googling) I came across a glowing pumpkin carved with a silhouetted cat and some stars and went THAT. I WANT TO DO THAT.

I knew it was going to be a pain and take forever, but I also wanted to challenge myself. I am so glad I did. I really love the result.

This Is Halloween Nail Art Challenge: Ghosts

I am a bit late to this challenge, but I only stumbled on it last night! How cool is this though? This challenge originated over at Lacquer Dreams and I hope that all the very talented ladies participating don't mind me crashing their party and arriving (fashionably) late.

Today's theme is Ghosts. I imagined little ghosties flying around in some sort of ghosty nether. Doing ghosty things. This is how that mental image ended up looking when applied to my nails: