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