World Map

Happy holidays, everyone! I hope this time of the year is especially filled with family, love, and blessings. This post is not about nail art, but on the Christmas present that my sister and I created for a best friend.

 

My friend gave us a worn in pair of white sneakers from Old Navy with the request that we make them look like an old map. 

I sponged on the old map background with acrylics - off white, yellow, brown, and black - with a small piece of sponge  On the parts of her shoes that had dirt spots, I  splotched on the darker paints. 

So, the shoe on the bottom was the starting point; what we were given to work with. The shoe on the top was about 40 minutes into the sponging. I realized that it didn't look at all like ancient paper. 

I ended up applying the paint with a wet sponge so the paint would blend together smoothly, and I added more off white and brown to dim down the yellow. 

Once the background dried, my sister took over to do the finer details. She began by drawing everything out in pencil and then went over it in black acrylic. 

Europe outlined in red on the left; compass rose on the right

Australia outlined in yellow

Northern Africa outlined in green

"Who lives sees, but who travels sees more."

Europe merging into Asia in blue

My sister and I are floored by how great these turned out! Totally would have kept them if they were my size.. Kidding of course..!

Tamara

Snowflakes

Finals are over and the first thing I did to begin a few weeks of mental downtown was nail art. 

I used two coats of Sinful Colors' Tokyo Pearl which is a really pretty pearly white polish. It is really transparent so you have to use at least three coats if you want it to stand on its own. 

I used Tokyo Pearl, Wet n Wild's Rain Check, and Poparazzi's Glam Factor to do a dry marble over Tokyo Pearl.  I took a piece of wax paper and put a drop of each polish  next to each other. You then fold the wax paper to mix the polishes together as much as you want and press it onto your nail. Really easy and a whole lot cleaner than water marbling. 

With the dry marble done and dry, I used Sinful Colors' Black on Black to stamp on the two snowflake pictured below.

Tamara

Glitter Matte

The last few weeks of the semester.. Boy, do I need some support to keep my mind focused!! How are you all keeping up? I just had to do my nails, so I used the simplest, fastest way to accessorize nails... glitter!

I bought this awesome NYC's Top of the Gold top coat at Target some time this year, but I haven't used it. I thought it was about time to change that!

I used two coats of Sinful Colors' Black on Black as the base color. I wanted the gold flakes to be concentrated on the bottom with a glitter gradient going towards the cuticle. I applied the glitter on two times and it was set; the flakes are really packed into this polish so it didn't need additional coats. Love it!! I topped it off with NYC'S Matte Me Crazy because I  can't get enough of black matte. Personally, it's 100x better than its glossy counterpart.

I also tried Top of the Gold on a matte, raspberry toned polish. It looked good in person, but the flakes got lost in the camera.

Tamara