Manicure Monday (103): Big Magic

Hi and welcome to Manicure Monday, a feature that combines my love of reading and nail polish. Each week I’ll showcase one of my current reads along with a matching book manicure.

It’s been quite a while since my last Manicure Monday post. No real excuse for it except to say that I really haven’t had much time lately to paint my nails one colors, much less do any nail art. I’ve been meaning to get back into it though and, at the urging of a friend, made the effort this week to play with some polish. Funny that the book that inspired this manicure is all about creative living.

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert is a book about finding inspiration and tapping into your creativity as a part of your every day life. I really enjoyed this book and found it to be very inspiring. The cover is also very bright and fun, making it a great candidate for Manicure Monday.

For my base, I started with Cult Nails Tempest, a pretty white creme. Sadly Cult Nails is no longer in business but you can just use any white that you have.

For the bursts of color, I cut apart a beauty sponge into a bunch of smaller pieces and used those to randomly place areas of colors on my nails. I tried to get a little bit of each color onto every nail but it was hard since I have really small nails. The book cover colors look like some kind of powder pigment. Mine colors obviously weren’t powders but I tried to fade the edges to that it would look more like powder particles. Below is a list of shades I used.

*American Apparel Angeline (darker hot pink)
* China Glaze Bottoms Up (neon pink)
* Zoya Gei Gei (shimmery baby pink)
* Barry M Cyan Blue (turquoise)
* Mineral Infusion Citrus Cove (orange)

I wanted the yellow to look more like it was splashed onto the nail so I used a splatter technique to apply it. All you do is take a small, narrow straw (I used the mixing straws from coffee shops) and dip one end into the bottle of polish. Tap it a bit to get some of the polish out (you won’t want it to be too goopy). Holding the straw 4-6 inches away from your nails, blow quickly onto your nails. This does take some trial and error and definitely put some paper under your hand to catch spraying nail polish. Repeat until you get the effect you want. Then clean up any stray polish bits with a brush and some remover. The yellow I used here is Sally Hansen Xtreme Mellow Yellow.

Wait for your manicure to dry pretty well before topping it all of with a coat of top coat. This was a really fun, summer manicure that was a lot of fun to wear. Thanks for checking out this week’s manicure. Hopefully it won’t be months until the next one. I already have some ideas in my head for what I want to do next. :)