What Else Would I Be For Halloween...?

Oh man... Haven't you just been waiting for today? I know I have!!! It's totally possible that I'm more excited about this than you, but finally... I PRESENT TO YOU... My Halloween nails!

TACO BELL!!!!

I love Taco Bell (which, if you read my blog a lot, you are probably tired of hearing). It is the best. It is gooey and delicious and full of happiness. So for Halloween I was a Taco Bell Hot Border Sauce! Below is a picture of my (home made) costume. But let's be honest, the nails complete the look! I was so happy with out these turned out. I've done Taco Bell nails tons of times before (You can see a simple logo design here and a first attempt at the Border Sauce look here), but these are BY FAR my favorite!

On my nails I painted the Taco Bell logo, the bell, and the word "Hot" in the Border Sauce lettering, since I was a Hot Sauce! Yay. Total happiness.

Well... Not total happiness... It's only 8am and Taco Bell isn't open yet so I'll have to wait to quench my craving until later today.

Brainsss....

... Or intestines, maybe? I don't know, these definitely don't look like brains, but I'm not totally sure what they *do* look like! To get this look, I followed Robin Moses' tutorial which can be seen here. She is the tutorial guru and I'm sure that if you follow her instructions you'll turn out with a better set of brains than I did! A problem that I have with nail art is that I'm not really that good at art -- I mean, I can copy things just find but when it comes to doing something more free form like brains I'm not always the best at figuring out how to make it look good. I hope this gets better with practice!

Anyways, another brains related post that you should check out is Michelle aka Sonoma Bento's Hello Kitty Halloween nails.  Michelle and I are both huge fans of Robin Moses (let's be honest, who isn't), so when Michelle saw Robin's tutorial she always knew she had to turn it into something new and creative! Michelle's take on the design is AWESOME!

Also, I may not post anything tomorrow BUT there's a good reason why. The post that I was going to do tomorrow is so awesome, so incredible, so magnificent, that I hate to post it on a Sunday (which is the day I get the least traffic). The post is the nails you've all been waiting for: my ACTUAL Halloween nails. And let me tell you, they are some of my favorite nails EVER!  So, I promise if there is no post tomorrow it is well worth waiting until Monday!!!

Edward Gorey Tree's

We are getting closer and closer to my actual Halloween nails!!! Aren't you so excited? They are probably my favorite nails ever. But for now, here are some Edward Gorey inspired trees.  Edward Gorey is one of my favorite author/artists. If you aren't familiar with him, he is infamous for writing very macabre picture books. If you were to just glace at his work you might think it was a children's book, which I suppose it could be, but an adult would truly see the sadness in his art. A lot of people compare him to Charles Addams (you know, The Addams Family), but I never really saw it. I always felt that Gorey had a melancholy surrounding his work where as Addams was much more humorous (if you're not really into macabre things, you might disagree with me on this one). Some of my favorite works by Gorey include The Doubtful Guest, The Epiplectic Bicycle, L'Heure Bleue, The Hapless Child, The Remembered Visit, and probably most significantly his illustrations for Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S.Eliot, which is the collection of poems that were the inspiration for the Broadway musical Cats!

For these nails I took inspiration from his most famous work which is The Gashlycrumb Tinies which is the alphabetic stories of 26 children's deaths. Below I included "K is for Kate who was struck with an axe," because the trees in this image were my main inspiration. Also, I totally just noticed that "an axe" is completely wrong gramatically... I guess he was just trying really hard to maintain the couplets since, "L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks."

Trick r' Treat

Here are some more old Halloween nails. I know, you're totally bored of Halloween nails, right? Well when you start getting bored of Christmas/holiday nails in a few days, you'll be happy I'm so behind on my posting! These are my Trick 'r Treat nails. Trick 'r Treat is a pretty awesome horror movie. It is separated into four parts, each of which tells a different Halloween-related horror story. Bringing the four parts together is Sam, who is featured on the movie poster below, and who wears a burlap sack over his bulbous head. I tried to paint him on my thumbs but it was such a gigantic fail that I didn't even take pictures of it. Everything I painted just looked like a circle with an orange stick figure body. I guess I still need some work on my shading! I hope you like these and that I'm not boring everyone too much with Halloween themes!

Eyeballs

There is something about how eyeballs look on nails that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.  My most common nail design is problem different attempts at eyeballs and these are some of my favorites! The first thing that I love about these is the semi-french tip-ness of them. By this I mean that they don't extend all the way down to my cuticles. That is one of my favorite nail looks. I also really like these because they have a gradient effect (largely this was covered up by the white of the eye, but if you look closely, you can see it). But most of all (as per the picture above), I like these because if you look at them from afar they totally look like Alec Baldwin's finger-tip eyeballs in Beetlejuice!

Owls and Moons

Tony, from TonyLikesThings on tumblr is awesome because he always has tons of nail art ideas! He asked for the Joy Division nails that I did here and ever since he will randomly ask me to do other nails. When he requested owl nails around Halloween, I decided to skip the super cute cartoonish owls that a lot of people have already done and go for something slightly more realistic. I ended up with this night scene that has an owl perched on a tree under the moon. Unfortunately for Tony, the owl didn't turn out very good. But I think the moon looks great! If I were to go back and do it again, I would try to make the owl stand out more... He sort of faded into the background. Oh well!

Also, if anyone has any, I sure could use some more requests! 

A Very Spongebob Halloween

Turns out I really stink at making cartoon characters. Here I made Vampire Spongebob and Mummy Patrick as a request from Naina Pickles on Tumblr. She asked for Spongebob nails and because it was the Halloween season I decided to spice them up. Looking back at these, I think they could have been good, but my line work is really shake-y for some reason. Which leads me into about myself:

I have a tremor! That's right, I shake uncontrollably. Everyone asks me how I'm able to do nail art because of the tremor, and my response is always that both of my hands shake at the same time so it isn't difficult at all! However, it does make doing other peoples nails more difficult. But as long as I steady my hands and really concentrate, I don't usually have too much of a problem.

The fact that I can still (usually) get pretty straight lines with a tremor should be an inspiration to everyone who says they could never do nail art. Anyone can do it! All you need is patience and nail polish! 

Zombie Skin?

I'm not 100% certain what I was going for here, but I think that these were supposed to be zombie skin. I think they ended up a bit too bright though. This is a great example of how I stink at taking photographs of my nails. If you look really really really closely, you can see the almost tie-dye effect that the green background has.

On my thumb and ring finger I layered some red over the black veins, which I think looks better than just the solid black.

Hope you enjoy! 

Halloween on Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! 
I thought I'd celebrate by sharing more old Halloween nails with you!

Here's another design by the amazing Lex at Attacked Astoria Nails. If you can't tell by the fact that I love to attempt her designs, I think she has a really awesome style. You can see her original nails here. She used a shimmer to top off her gradient, but because I don't own any shimmers, I ended up using Kleancolor's orange holo. I thought that it blended the gradient background perfectly.

Spooky Candle

This was the week that I was being super un-creative and just copying other peoples beautiful designs. These were designed by Michelle aka Sonoma Bento -- One of my all time favorite nail artists. Her original set can be seen here. Can we just talk about how creative this girl is for a second here? These were part of her 31 day challenge and these were for the gradient day. UMMM that's amazing! This is such an awesome take on gradients. Everyone is so used to the typical gradients, but Michelle took it over the top.

I first discovered Michelle's work via Robin Moses, who posted Michelle's adorable tribute nails to Moses' dog Fishay, which can be seen here. Then, without knowing it, I saw more of Michelle's work in Leslie's (from Polish Art Addiction) "Good Enough to Eat" Contest. Michelle entered her awesome trout nails. I showed them to my friend who loves fishing and I think he fell in love a little bit. Then FINALLY Michelle started her own blog and now I find myself checking her blog more often than I check my email!

I hope that if you do anything today, it is to check out (and follow, and comment on) Michelle's blog. She is the best.

The Omen

Again, I share with you my insanely belated Halloween nail art. The Omen was one of my favorite movies when I was growing up. It both terrified and interested me. If you haven't seen the original, I would highly recommend it. If you aren't a horror movie fan, you might enjoy it anyway because it stars the AMAZING Gregory Peck! Without spoiling anything I'll tell you that it is about a family who discover that their son (aptly named Damien) is evil. I'm also a firm believer that all of the sequels (so The Omen I through The Omen IV) are incredible.

There are a number of horrible things that happened in conjunction with the filming of these movies that the cast and crew referred to as bad "omens." Some felt that the nature of the movies was causing these bad things to happen. So that I don't make this blog post too ominous, I'll just point you to this site which lists many of the happenings. 

Pumpkins

You may recognize these nails if you're on Tumblr, because for some reason, they circulated... A LOT.  When I first painted these, I thought that they were okay but I wasn't particularly proud of them. Now I like them a little more.  Because they received so much attention on Tumblr, I quickly made a tutorial on how to do them, which can be seen here.

I guess that the popularity these nails got made me wonder, do you think a really great nail design is easy to replicate?

Polka Dots

Okay, so Leslie from Polish Art Addiction and I must be on like the same wavelength these last couple of weeks because I painted these nails in early October and just the other day Leslie posted nails that are very similar to these! We both also posted Muppets nails on the same day, weird right? Here are her Muppet nails, and here are mine.

Leslie's version of these nails is much softer and more elegant (BONUS: she also posted a picture tutorial), where as I was trying for some high contrast to be a little Halloween-y. I ended up really liking my thumb, where I alternated the colors creating an almost diagonal effect. 

A Creepy Night Sky

And now.... For all of my really belated Halloween posts! As if you aren't already tired of Halloween nail art! These are a simple gradient that I made to look like a creepy night sky. I ended up loving them! I really enjoy gradient looks and it's a look I can usually do pretty quickly, so I tend to do them a lot!

I ended up liking my right hand more than my left hand for these nails (which is odd since I'm right handed). I notice that that's happening more often, I wonder if it's because I paint my left hand first, then I figure out all of the intricacies when I move on to my right hand. Does that ever happen to you? 

A Halloween Preview

Happy Halloween!!!

I'm still working through my backlog of nails, which means that you all haven't even seen any of my Halloween designs yet! But I figured since today is my favorite holiday that I would give you all a sneak preview of my Halloween costume, which OF COURSE has nails that go alone with it. But you'll just have to wait to see the nails!

I am a Taco Bell hot sauce! I love Taco Bell!!! Which if you've read my blog before, you know, because I constantly write about how much I love Taco Bell. If you just can't wait to see the nail design that went with this costume, you can see my previous Taco Bell nail designs here (my first T-Bell design, and one of my first original designs) and here (which is more recent, and what I was *thinking* of wearing with this costume).

What were you for Halloween? 

Halloween Skulls

Man, I sure am getting bored of a lot of my nails lately. I re-tried this design in order to make a tutorial for it which can be seen here. When I make tutorials, my nails always come out worse because I'm trying to get a close up of my nails without knocking my camera over with my paint brush. My first attempt at these nails can be seen here. They are (obviously) way better than these ones. Hope you guys like them! And if anyone tries them out, I'd love to see it!