We interrupt your regularly scheduled Tri-Polish Challenge...

I didn't plan on it, but I think I am going to sit out this month of the TPC.
I really was going to take part, but I just absolutely love my current mani, and there is another NP fan at work who hasn't yet seen it, so I am going to keep it on so I can show her!

Oh, you are wondering what it is?
Sure, glad to share!

This is a base color of Gelish Mini Up To The Blue (see, I WAS planning on doing the TPC!) stamped with Color Club Harp On It, using the four Fireworks images from Vivid Lacquer's latest release of plates, VL015. I love it! Imagine, this picture was taken at night with room lighting and the flash from my camera. I had to turn off my full spectrum light because it was too much for the camera to handle!

I just love the way this stamped! Exactly the reason I bought the Color Club in the first place! And Anni's plates are always grand!

Maybe I will take part, just a little behind. Depends upon if I can give this up!

Adios!
~~Lizajane

Tri-Polish Challenge-Pippa loves the Packers, and they love her back

Today is the last day with our lovely red, yellow and greens. Next month, Crumpet assigned us lilac, pink, and blue. Oh, my.

Pippa has been somewhat neglected this challenge. Probably because the other two are just so gorgeous, and yellow is hard to whip into shape. So I decided to try the reciprocal gradient again, this time with higher contrast colors.

I have to say, I like this much better than the other day's.

This second pic shows the two yellow application techniques I used. Pinky (on the left) got the yellow sponged on (tiny corner of a sponge torn off and held with a hemostat), but by my middle finger (on the right) I had decided to just use the brushes. First layer was sponged for both colors, so you do get SOME of that softer gradient.

Only problem, for me, is that I live in Green Bay Packer country, and I just can't see this color combination without thinking of them. And I usually don't start thinking of them until the pre-season is over.

So check out the rest of the Nail Tart's designs by following the links below.
See you next month.

Adios!
~~Lizajane

Tri-Polish Challenge-August #3-Dragons in the Roses

Happy Heat Wave here! Summer is back, as expected at the end of August in the US.
My hot polishes for this month's Tri-Polish Challenge are A. England BriarRose, Zoya Pippa, and A. England Dragon.

This time I am only using the two A. Englands.
I have loved the Reciprocal Gradient since I first saw it this spring, so I was looking forward to trying this.

I dunno.
Maybe next time I will use more contrasting colors. These are too close in value.

I painted on one coat of Briar Rose, then painted a swipe of  Briar Rose and Dragon next to each other on a sponge, then sponged the colors on. After letting them dry for a bit, I put manicure tape on. Then more polish on the sponge and more dabbing on, but in the opposite direction.

After some half-hearted cleanup, I topped it off with Seche Vite.

Next time will be better. And there WILL be a next time. This isn't as clean as I would want. Next time I think I will use just a small piece of sponge and dab them on separately. That will make for better color saturation and more precise application.

I wonder what the other Tarts are doing today. Let's take a look in the links below.

Adios!
~~Lizajane

Tri-Polish Challenge-August #2-Flowers near the Waterfall

Hi there! Hope you are having a great week. I am having a mixed week, but am home and relaxing, glass of sangria has been achieved.

Second manicure in this red, yellow and green challenge.

My polish choices-A. England Briar Rose, Zoya Pippa and A. England Dragon. This time I also used white-Picture Polish White Wedding.

I am calling this one Flowers near the waterfall.  Dotted the flowers and did the waterfall technique on the rest.

Check the rest of the Crumpet's Nail Tarts group's efforts. Such pretty manicures!

Adios!
~~Lizajane

Tri Polish Challenge-August #1-Roses among the Leaves

Welcome to the August edition of Crumpet's Nail Tarts Tri-Polish Challenge, the fun challenge where we are assigned three colors to use in four manicures, along with black, white, silver, gold and glitter topcoats. For August we are assigned Red, Yellow, and Green.

I chose to use A. England's Briar Rose, Zoya Pippa, and A. England's Dragon.

I stamped my base color of black (actually Midnight Rendezvous Gel topped with China Glaze Lubu Heels) with Dragon in the leaf pattern, and then with Briar Rose in a rose pattern.

Except for my right thumb which got a barbed wire.

I really like it, but better without the roses, this particular nail looks the best, it was less busy.

Look at what the other Tarts are doing with these colors, we are always so creative!

Adios!
~~Lizajane

Tri Polish Challenge-July #4

Happy Thursday! Just squeaking this one in before bedtime! Busy day today.

In all likelihood, you know the rules, but here is a quick review.
Debbie Crumpet's Facebook group, NailTarts, originates the challenge. Each month, they select three colors to use-this month is blue, blue, and green-and each participant chooses one polish to represent each color. They then use at least two in each of four manicures, and one of the four must have all three. Black, white, silver, gold and glitter toppers are freebies.

I went extremely simple with this mani. Just a base color of Zoya Ivanka because I love the bright green! and then three largish dots down my accent nail-in Maybelline Navy Narcissist-and then those topped with slightly smaller dots of Nicole by OPI Blue-berry Sweet On You. Seche Vite on all, except the accent nail also got a coat of Gelous.

I am on day three of this mani and it is going strong (except on my weak spots-next up is my first attempt at gels, I need to improve the strength!)

You can really see the 3-D effect in this last picture! I know I tried this last month, but this month, I SUCCEEDED!

Take a look at what the other Tarts have been up to-I am sure it is gorgeous!

Adios!
~~Lizajane

Tri-Polish Challenge-July #3

Hey! How's everyone doing? The nasty high temperatures broke so it is very comfortable here, yay!

Today, I experimented.

Everyone says that you can stamp over the textured polishes, but I didn't really believe it. Not that I didn't believe the people, I just thought they must be much better than I am.

The Nicole by OPI Blue-Berry Sweet On You is a textured polish-see, it says Gumdrops on the handle! So I layed it down for a first color. Then I went to my favorite stamping plates-the whole Vivid Lacquer line.

As I was asking my husband whether to do Houndstooth or Stars, I spotted a different design, and stopped short. Yep, Tetris was it. (VL 002 has both the stars and block-game, houndstooth is on VL005.)

As you can see, it truly does receive stamping excellently! After stamping with Wet & Wild Ebony Hates Chris,  I went in and used my other two Challenge colors, Navy Narcissist and Ivanka (as well as Zoya Trixie) to fill in some of the blocks.

After doing that, I decided that Blue-berry was too shiny, so I matted the manicure. As long as I was in an experimental mood, I decided to compare the two matte topcoats I have, NYC Matte Me Crazy and China Glaze Matte Magic.

Left-NYC  Right-China Glaze

This really confirmed my suspicions, China Glaze Matte Magic isn't what I would call Matte. It is barely flat. I am sure that I will find some application for it, but...serious mattifying isn't it.

So, thank you, Crumpet, for channeling our creativity by these rules-three colors assigned, and bonus black, white, silver, gold, and glitter toppers. So many different ideas have been floated...check out the links to see what we put out there today!

Adios!
~~Lizajane

Tri-Polish Challenge-July #2

 

Happy Thursday!

The Crumpet set July's colors as Blue, Blue, and Green.

I selected Nicole by OPI's Blueberry Sweet on Me, Zoya Ivanka, and Maybelline Navy Narcissist.

Oh, the mani-manity!

This is such a fail nail, but I wanted a palate cleanser (Zoya Kimber is  doing that nicely) that I didn't re-do it.

It had such potential!

Just a nice funky french to start, but that was only one of the colors, and we are supposed to use at least two in each mani, so I added a line of Navy Narcissist, cleaned that up and then added dots of Blueberry....

Not great, but not really a fail nail.
Then I grabbed the Fairy Dust, because...Fairy Dust helps everything. Right?

Yeah, maybe not. At least not if you accidentally grab China Glaze Glistening Snow instead.

Glistening Snow is like Fairy Dust on steroids. And it completely obliterated any remaining beauty in this mani.

Better luck next time, Liza. Put on your thinking cap and hope you don't get called in this weekend so you can put some pretty on your nails.

Cleanse YOUR palate by looking at the other Tarts' manis.

Adios!
~~Lizajane

Tri-Polish Challenge-July #1

Hello again, Tarts!
I had thought to skip this month's TPC, but I found myself wearing a Blue & Blue mani and decided to hold off on putting it out there in internet-land, so I have at least the first installment today.

Yes, really it IS two blues! Base color is Maybelline Navy Narcissist, top coated, taped, and then Nicole by OPI Blueberry Sweet On You. This was so cool, lasted well (four days) and was easy to touch up where my nails are super weak.

Sorry that this photo is off center and blurry, but I just loved the lighting here. My car is a wonderful light box, LOL.

Check out the other manicures the Nail Tarts are creating for this month's Blue, Blue, and Green colors (and the white, black, silver, gold, and glitter toppers.)

Adios~
~~Lizajane

Let Freedom Ring!

Independence Day this week, Thursday, so I felt like celebrating with a little Red, White and Blue!

Base color of Zoya Purity, then a coat of Pure Ice Freedom, and then a gradient of L'oreal Miss Pixie. Miss Pixie is a jelly, so the gradient just about did itself!  Freedom is lumpy bumpy, so I put on two coats of Gelous and then finished it off with Seche Vite.

There were a few silver stars in Freedom, but at least in my application, they tended to get lost amongst the other glitters.

Considering two weeks ago I was swearing off glitter, this is pretty amazing. But it is for a HOLIDAY!

Happy Fourth of July to the 'Mericans, Happy Canada (yesterday) to the Canadians. Happy Summer to all of us!

Adios!
~~Lizajane

Tri-Polish Challenge-June #4

Yay! We made it through another month of the Tri-Polish Challenge! For some reason, it seems that a number of people had inspiration issues this month. I decided after my second manicure that I didn't love the polishes that I chose, but I managed to get ideas anyway.

 (You are given colors and have to select a polish for each to use in four manis, and you can use black, white, gold, silver and glitter topcoats, too.)

All along I wanted to do a gradient, and Tuesday was filled with tape manis, so here we go with my combination of the two.

I had a couple of days of wear on my base colors of Llarowe's P38 over Zoya FeiFei, so it was nicely dry for the tape application. I then took a little torn piece of my makeup sponge, clicked it with the hemostat and dabbed on the purple, then the pink, and then the red. I then took the tape off and tossed on a coat of Seche Vite.

This is a more distinct gradient rather than a smooth one.

Pretty happy with this iteration of  these colors! This works for me-although I had envisioned over white, I couldn't pass up the black.

Thanks again Debbie Crumpet for setting up this challenge. Sometimes more challenging than others-I suppose, for me at least, I don't want to be a copycat, but there are so many gorgeous manicures that the Tarts come up with! So take a look at today's offerings by clicking on the Inlinkz below.

Adios!
~~Lizajane

Tri-Polish Challenge-June #3

I did some stamping! Glad I thought of it, I love how this manicure turned out.

That is two coats of OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls over OPI Nail Envy Matte, topped with a coat of Seche Vite, just in case I would have to remove a stamped image-it preserves the base color.

Then I tried a technique, new to me, but you have probably seen it before. Instead of one color polish being used, you put two colors on the plate and then scrape. I think it worked really well with my purple and pink!

I used another Vivid Lacquer plate, VL008-love the kitty!

This plate has a series of he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not images and then the one in the lower corner I used for most of my fingers. Under my fingers is the reverse image which I used on my accent nails. I love all her plates, and hint, hint, she's working on her next ones, watch for them here.

CritiqueCorner
Gee, since it tends to come up every time, should I actually make it a feature highlighting what I did wrong or what I think looks wrong? Two things this time-in the second photo you can see on my ring finger that I had to double stamp, somehow the original didn't go all the way down to the base of my nail, and in this last photo you can see it is darker along the edge? Well, I learned that you should always topcoat your stamped image before trying to clean up the edges. I took a very obvious wedge out of the image with my clean up tool. I corrected it by scraping up some of the polish that had been scraped off the plate and applying it to fill in the color. I suppose I should have just taken the whole thing off and restamped, but I guess I was just a bit too lazy.

Take a look at what the other Tarts have accomplished with this third manicure of June-how many ways can we all combine purple, pink and red? So many great ideas!

Adios!
~~Lizajane

Tri-Polish Challenge-June #2

Red, Purple, and Pink! Love all three of these color separately, and together, but I think I chose particularly "wintery" versions of each. Because that is what I love!

I tried to do that three dimensional look with dots, but it ended up just being "offset dots", mainly because I used the same dotting tool to do both colors, and I think that a smaller one should have been used for the second set, this time in pink.

Offset dots are cool, though, too!

I have no idea what I did to get a black background, LOL.
All three colors went together nicely, two coats of my purple-Orchid Express, and then dots with Isla and Rose Radiance, Seche Vite to topcoat.

Next mani, I think I need to stamp, because that is another reason why I chose these colors, all three stamp wonderfully!

I am pretty impressed with all the manicures other Tarts are putting out there, and I probably will copy at least one of them! Look at what they did for this month's second installment-

Adios!
~~Lizajane

Tri-Polish Challenge-June #1

Third Tuesday of June, so it is time for the first of this month's Tri-Polish Challenge manicures.
Basic Rules of this challenge:

• Three colors selected by and posted on The Crumpet's Facebook page.
• Select a polish to represent each of those colors.
• Do four manicures, at least one using all three colors, and all of them using at least two of the colors.
• You can also use black, white, silver, gold, and glitter topcoats.
• Post the manis on your blog or straight to the Nail Tarts FB page and link up using Inlinkz.
• Profit. 

OK, maybe not profit.

This month the colors are Red, Purple, and Pink. Here are my polishes:

 That there is Zoya Isla (my tip top favorite red!), Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Orchid Express, and Orly Rose Radiance.

 Full sunlight

Today, I am only using two, the purple and the red, along with my silver striper and tape as a tool. This is so simple and graphic, I love it!

Even fuller sunlight

This mani succumbed to my inability to stop when I am ahead.

I thought it would be cool to make pyramids on either side of the stripe, don't ask me why. But when it got this far, I realized I wouldn't be able to do that.

Inside, indirect sunlight

Oh, well. In other colors, this would have been a cool football or baseball or patchwork manicure.

Take a look at the other Tarts and their manicures-pretty much bound to be better than this. Better luck next time, Lizajane!

 

 

Adios!
~~Lizajane