Lazy Days of Summer Challenge: Favourite Fruit

My favourite fruit is a type of grape that grows in Ancient Olympia, where my parents come from and where I spent every summer of my childhood (and yes, technically I am an Olympian,  though not so much of a godess). They are black seedless grapes and usually you can fbuy them sundried as currants, but I always preferred them fresh as they have a gorgeously sweet taste and their smell is intoxicatingly summery. I also love their texture. They look like they have this pale lavender dusting that if you touch it you see the deep purple of their skin. They are an aesthetic and gustatorial pleasure! Here is my attempt at it!

Nails Inc - Duke of Wellington Place a.k.a.I created a swamp (monster)

I went a bit abstract this time. I've been too stressed to sit down and think of a design, I just wanted to make something. It looks a bit like a swamp at dusk, but it's fine! I started with a dark blue-ish grey (nails inc - Duke of Wellington Place), then dotted it with a golden olive (China Glaze - Peace on Earth) and then added details with a blue/teal/lavender multichrome polish (Leighton Denny - Your Planet or Mine). It's a shame the sun wasn't out and I couldn't show the other colour shifts in Your Planet or Mine. It really brought the whole thing together and made it interesting. I'm glad I thought of adding it because I was one step away from calling this mani a failed experiment and removing it.

Natural light (cloudy gloomy weather)

Artificial light

I'm also thinking of making a lightbox. I'm tired of this glare in my pictures! It's annoying.

Eleonora di Toledo Nails

This is Eleonora di Toledo, one of the great ladies of the Renaissance, wearing one of the most important dresses in the history of art made from a fabric that was extremely hard to make (it required six different processes to make it), expensive (real gold thread amongst other fine raw materials) and politically significant; the epitome of a 'statement dress' if ever I knew of one.

Eleonora di Toledo, Bronzino portrait

A dress recreation. Picture via

I have loved that portrait and that dress since I was very young when I used to see it in a book my uncle had given me from the Uffici Gallery in Florence. I saw the portrait again recently and really wanted to recreate part of the design on my nails. The end result is not fantastic, it looks a bit tribal instead of soft and organic, but I am pleased with it since it's only the second time I've used brushes and acrylics and going from cats'whiskers to a renaissance pattern is a giant leap. I've also learned a lot about the sort of brushes I need to get/make. I am really enjoying the learning process and a difficult pattern like this is a pleasant challenge. 

With my non-dominant hand I tried to make a netting with pearls like the one she had on her hair and at the top of the dress. 

I also managed to pleat a 5-strand braid!

The breakdown

Base colour: OPI Skuls and Glossbones

the black colour is acrylic

Golden colour: Ciate - Gold Digga

Pearls: one drop of Jessica - 687 Au Natural and one drop of OPI - Kyoto Pearl on top.

Frosty High

It's been frosty yet sunny these days and the bare tree branches look so nice with frost on them. If only the pavements weren't so slippery and dangerous! I hate having to walk around when there's sleet. I'm not used to it at all and as a result I walk around like an old duck, looking at everyone else who, being more northern than I am, walk normally. How do they do it? Is it a superhuman skill? Ugh...

Btw have you noticed the Google Doodle today? It's for Charles Dickens'200th birthday! Yay! I hope people turn to reading more of his books this year. I was reading earlier in a British newspaper that kids these days lack the attention span for reading his books and if that isn't a sad thing, I don't know what is. 

Anyway, I shouldn's stray off on other topics too much or at least that is the purpose of this blog. Back to the mani! It's a blue skies&branches&snow theme! I used China Glaze - Flyin'High as a base, Le Chat Cm 04 Brown Nail Art Polish for the branches, Etude House - WH702 for the snow and Seche Vite Top Coat.

Experimenting with Dots and Stripes

I felt a bit inspired and was in the mood to experiment with the striper brush and my dotting tools. The result was neither quite how I imagined it nor perfectly neat, but I'm pleased since it's only a first attempt. The more I was doing, the more ideas I was getting and it ended more messy than I initially planned, but that is the nature of experimentation I suppose!

Also, I know that some people prefer to see pictures post-clean up, but I want to mark my progress in not making a total mess when applying polish so I prefer posting my pre-clean up pictures. Eventually I won't be making a mess of my cuticles and my pictures will look neater! Enough with the rant, here's the manicure 

(artificial light)

The base colours I picked are all shot through with a subtle white pearl which makes the manicure come to life, but this element doesn't translate well in the pictures. What a pity!
Base colours (index to pinky)
Misa - Fribbelicious
Zoya - Pasha
Nina Ultra Pro - In a Tiff
Jessica - 687 Au Natural

Stripes
CM Nail Art - 4 Brown

Dots
Ciate - 030 Gold Digga
Nina Ultra Pro - In a Tiff
Misa - Fribbelicious