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!

Reddit 52 Week Challenge: Week 5 Orange

Busy busy! I was kind of sad to take off my bone piles, but I think this looks really cool and fascinating. I was looking through my stamping plates for inspiration and came across a weird design on Bundle Monster plate 206. I don't know what it is... could be balls of string. Or some sort of abstract viney flower thing. Either way, I thought "This is cool, but it needs eyes."

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 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:

Reddit 52 Week Challenge: Week 1 Taping with China Glaze Riveting

I frequent a section of Reddit called RedditLaqueristas. It is full of awesome people who love nail polish! This week we begin a new year of the 52 Week Challenge. Every week for the next year there will be a new theme to inspire awesome nail art!

Here is the 52 Week Challenge on Reddit

The first week's theme is taping! I have never done this before! It is extremely annoying and I don't own the thin nail art tape, so I used masking tape cut up. Masking tape is good because you get less bleeding, but for the design I chose to do I really needed the thin tape.

Either way! I think my first 52 Week Challenge mani looks really pretty.

I started with 2 coats of China Glaze Riveting (this colour is AMAZING). It's an extremely rich reddy orange with chunky gold shimmer. I love it! The dark colour on the tips is OPI Every Month Is Oktoberfest and the glitter stripes are China Glaze I Herd That.

I think this works beautifully. The red shimmer in Every Month Is Oktoberfest is subtle, but the other colours really bring it out. I Herd That is very dense gold and copper glitter with a sprinkling of holo glitter. This colour is also amazing! The fiery orange of Riveting really plays off the copper in I Herd That.

This was totally worth all the time, effort and cursing involved. 

Cheat sheet:

1. Orly Nail Defense - 1 coat
2. China Glaze Riveting - 2 coats
3. OPI Every Month Is Oktoberfest - 1 coat (taped)
4. China Glaze I Herd That - 2 coats (taped)
5. Orly Polishield - 1 coat

Next week on the 52 Week Challenge the theme is Blue. Woo!

Ninja Polish Color Changing Garnet swatches

This is one of my new polishes that I was very excited about and it didn't disappoint! Color Changing Garnet is part of the Facets collection from Ninja Polish, one of three gorgeous multichromatic polishes named after color changing gemstones. The other two are Alexandrite and Zultanite.