Mardi Gras and Valentine's Day/Chinese New Year Manicures

I am late posting these because my parents were in town this weekend (a major production since the airports were non functional part of the weekend).  They thought me photographing my nails was funny but I didn't want to push my luck by busting out the Photoshop and starting to Blog.

This is my manicure from Saturday the 13th.  I have been a belly dancer for the past 10 years and Saturday my troupe danced at a Mardi Gras fund raiser so I wanted to get in the spirit.

I started with a base of Fingerpaints Icy Iris, which I have had for a month but hadn't had an opportunity to use yet.  EVERYTHING you have heard about Icy Iris is true.  It applies smooth, with full coverage in 2 coats and it is freaking gorgeous.  For those of you that haven't seen it, this is a deep purple with lighter purple/raspberry foil particles.  The foil is very small so it looks like very small glitter but it is sooooo much smoother, it also dries really fast. It was slightly dull to my eye once it dried but nothing a layer of top didn't fix.

 

Fingerpaints Icy Iris 2 coats with top.  The foil is pinker in person.  Yes that is 12 inches of snow in Dallas in the background.

Once I had a nice purple base I grabbed Rimmel Camouflage and New York Summer Hot Metallic Gold and Konad plate M69.  I painted the bottom of the ribbon design (well they look like ribbons to me) green and the top half gold and as Emeril would say BAM!

 

   Mardi Gras konadicure with flash, yes I am that pale.  The light box comes tomorrow hopefully photos will improve.

By Sunday I was tired of all things Valentine's Day and was really looking forward to a nice Chinese New Year mani in red...thats enough Valentine's Day cheer right?  Last week on my snow day I grabbed a new Konad plate I have been wanting to experiment with, M66 the one that shows parts of an Asian landscape.

I borrowed this picture from http://www.thenailart.com/ but I have never used their site for anything but looking at Konad plates, they have HUGE pictures of each.

Anyway I had been wanting to use little bits and pieces of the whole plate on different nails so each nail was different.  Chinese New Year gave me a great excuse to buy the plate and try this out.

 

China Rouge (2 coats) with top

I began with 2 coats of my favorite red creme, China Glaze China Rouge and then stamped New York Summer Hot Metallic Gold (hey its my go to gold stamping polish).  The overall manicure ended up being very subtle as the lines on most of these designs are very thin.  Black or silver would have provided more contrast.  It looked nice but you didn't really notice the designs unless you were close to my hands.  Photographing this was a complete nightmare, I couldn't get pictures that showed the details at all.
This is the best one I was able to get:

 

pinky - chrysanthemum (I think thats what it is)

ring - bamboo

index - woman

pointer - lotus

thumb - cherry blossom (not in picture though) 

I almost didn't post this as the photo looks like poop but I like the idea, I just need to use colors with more contrast between them.