SIMPLE(R) SUNDAY: The Black Knight

I went to see Monty Python's Spamalot tonight. It married the goofiness of the original with the camp of musical theatre, which was great. It also had a tendency to keep all women on stage as scantily clad as possible, and featured a huge foray into gender/sexual orientation stereotyping, which made me uncomfortable. Especially the ladies thing, it was pretty blatant.

HOWEVER.

Because the original Quest for the Holy Grail is awesome, I did up some nails.

Ah, the Black Knight. Good bloke.

This look could not be easier. Paint shapes in white, then fill in with black and dark grey (for the gauntlets). Thank YOU, Monty Python's amazingly low operating budget! I used a nail art pen for the writing, and clearly need to find a less watery nail art pen. Any suggestions?

I have one other look inspired by the Quest for the Holy Grail, which I hope to get to sooner or later. It'll be a bit more effort, but could be hilarious. And who doesn't love hilarious?

Polishes used:

Pretty Serious - Nightmaren (seriously SO glowy in person, click here for a picture)

acrylic paint in white and black

nail art brush (standard size)

Duri - Rejuvacote (base coat)

Nail Pattern Boldness - Glitter Food

Sally Hansen - Insta-Dri (top coat)

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.