March 17, 2014

Manicure Monday (55): The Gone-Away World

Hello and welcome to Manicure Monday, a weekly feature where I meld my love of reading with my love of nail polish and share a current read along with a matching book manicure.Hello hello, everyone. This weekend just flew by. I saw the Veronica Mars movie and loved it. I actually saw a test screening months ago, but it was really nice to see the final product. It’s also been crazy warm here so I’ve been enjoying the outdoors a bit. Not much reading was done, but I hope to catch up this week. On with the manicure!

This week’s book is The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. It’s not the most inspiring of covers, as you can see, but it was the only book I was reading this weekend so I used my imagination. I decided to do a simple gradient with two colors, hot pink and lime green.

I started off with one coat of a basic white polish (OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls) to give the gradient a nice base and to help the neon colors pop. I taped off my cuticles using Scotch tape to minimize cleanup later. Then, using a makeup sponge, I painted Hard Candy Pretty in Punk (hot pink) and Orly Fresh (lime green) directly onto the sponge, making sure that the colors overlapped. Next I gently rolled and patted the sponge onto each nail, reapplying the polish when necessary. I had to do this a few times on each nail until I built up sufficient opacity.

While it was still slightly wet, I put on one coat of top coat to blend the colors and seal everything in. I took off the tape and cleaned up my cuticles using a small nail brush and some acetone.

And that’s it. While this isn’t the most interesting cover or manicure, I like how this gradient came out. I am not usually very good at gradients but I think this came out well and the colors are eye searing, which is what I like. :)
Has anyone read this yet? It’s this month’s book club pick and I can’t tell what kind of a book it is yet. Seems sci-fi but also Western with highly stylized writing. It’s a whopper at over 500 pages but I am trying to finish before my meeting in 9 days. We’ll see what happens.

I hope you liked today’s manicure. It has green in it so I am all set for St. Patt’s Day tomorrow. Have a great week, everyone!