YODA YODA YODA

Warning: this one's gonna be a bit picture heavy! And I just bought a light box, and I have no idea how to use it, so some of these are overexposed like it's going out of style (which it is; it is out of style).

A friend of mine posted a photo to my wall of Zoidberg nail art, suggesting in a way that I do nail art that uses all 5 fingers together instead of treating them as 5 little separate canvases. He then jokingly said, "Do Yoda!"

So I did Yoda.

HIYAH!

This took forever and a year, but I'm pretty pleased with the result. Not sure that it looks like Yoda (and Younger Yoda's hair is creepy and I wish I'd just left him bald), but it took a lot of patience and layers and so I love it on the principle of effort paid.

This is my source image:

I butchered him ;___;

This is another image that popped up while I was searching:

I may need this in my life.

I began with a base of Jaded (two coats; it's a beautiful, subtle scattered holo polish in a nice crelly finish but mine was mysteriously sort of... sticky? So I may thin it just a bit in future) and one coat of Street Magic. The combination was super-pretty, so here is an shot of it. Excuse the dry cuticles; that's what prepping with acetone will do to ya.

I'd get into the actual painting method, but it was long and complicated (and sort of not really a method); it involved sketching the source image at a 1.5" x 1" size, transferring it to my nails (this was a pain), outlining with black acrylic, and then doing a sort of riff on Paint by Numbers to get the colours down.

MOAR HIYAH!

If you zoom this, you can see micro-cracks in the acrylic paint, and that's WEIRD.

 Putting the pose together requires a very awkward hand position. Ouch.

Last one, I promise. I wish I could do straight lines better with my detail brush. Poor lightsaber.

BONUS: the lightsaber glows in the dark! I couldn't get the neon green colour out of my acrylics (working only with sap green), so I made up for it by making it glow. :)

I love that the lightsaber is the only thing you can see. You get the idea!!

Polishes used:
Tryst Lacquers - Jaded (base colour)
Girly Bits - Street Magic (on top of base colour)
OPI - Nail Envy Matte (base coat)
INM - Out the Door (top coat)
Poshé (top coat)
GOLDEN Open acrylic paints (highly recommended; do not dry out as fast)
0/10 brush of pure detail looooove <3

Not sure what I'll do next, but it probably won't be so involved. Heh.


J.

Staticky TV Screens

So, remember when I said I was next going to be taking it easy? Lies.

Still with the winter thing. The street is so deeply rutted with ice that driving IN the ruts is a death wish for your car's undercarriage. I've considered hiring a Sherpa for all my travelling needs.

I was taking a look at the LeaLaC plate I ordered from Llarowe last month and was struck by the rounded rectangles (3rd row from bottom, 4th column from left). They kind of reminded me of a bank of TVs, and my mind wandered to horror tropes of static-filled TV screens, kind of like this. (Note: I don't watch horror movies, I am the least qualified person to being mining them for inspiration.)

AND THEN I thought of something much happier, which is Persona 4. I think Aegis from P3 remains my favourite Persona character of all time, but Kanji from P4 is a close second. What a dreamboat.

Soooo anyway, the TV screens! The Midnight Channel! The static! The swallowing up our brave protagonists!

The steely hair of our unnamed hero, to match his steely will! Ok I'll stop now.

Depressingly, this took about as long as the Valentine's nail art I did, except the results are nowhere near as impressive. And it was a huge pain in the butt. HUGE PAIN IN THE BUTT. There is, however, one upside-- and I will get to it in a little bit.

I'm getting more consistent with hand position, which is a small victory I suppose.

The first step was getting the static going. A full 7 steps went into building it up. I started with Nfu Oh JS03, followed by a heavy dose of the spun sugar technique (I did it MUCH thinner than XOXO Alexis Leigh is doing it in the video, but same principle) with GOSH Nero, again with the spun sugar in Revlon Spirit, then spent a dizzying amount of time dotting Nero and Spirit all over the place with my tiniest dotter, followed by another coat of JS03 and a coat of American Apparel Moon. Then NYColor Grand Central Station to get it all to dry so I could SLEEP.

DOESN'T EVEN LOOK LIKE STATIC

This afternoon, I stamped the shapes over my nails with the LeaLaC plate using Nero again, and then whipped out my tiniest brush to fill in the in-between spaces with the black polish, add teeny silver dots to represent the TV knobs, and little reflection marks in white to try to give some dimension to the TV screens. Then two more coats of topcoat to even it all out, and a bit of clean up, and finally done.

You can see some of the neurotically thin spun sugar effect going on at the edge of my nail.

But, in a way, this was a worthwhile endeavour, because I got to use Moon. (My partner has been bugging me to use it since the day I bought it and, if nothing else, this mani makes him very happy.) Because Moon DOES THIS!

This photo involved tenting a blanket over me, a self-timer, manual shutter speed, manual focus, and a slapdash process of charging up the nails by lamp, hitting the shutter, shutting off the light, and stopping breathing.

So there you have it. A mani for all of us with a soft spot for horror films and/or Japanese RPGs.

Polishes used:

Nfu Oh - JS03

GOSH - Nero

Revlon Top Speed - Spirit

American Apparel - Moon

Sally Hansen Insta-Dri - Silver Sweep

OPI - Nail Envy Matte (base coat)

New York Color - Grand Central Station (topcoat)

J.