September 2, 2013

Manicure Monday (30): Dark Triumph

Manicure Monday is a weekly feature that combines my love of nail polish and reading. Each week I’ll show you one of my current reads along with what’s on my nails.

Man my internet really hates me right now. It took me 10 minutes just to open up a blank post page. Argh. Anyway, happy Labor Day! I hope that you guys get the day off like me. I am really excited about having an extra day off. I’ve gotten a lot of reading done this weekend and one of the books I finished is the inspiration for this week’s Manicure Monday.

Dark Triumph by Robin LaFevers is the second book in the His Dark Assassin series. I loved the first book in the series, Grave Mercy, and loved this one as well. It’s always so nice when a book is as good as you hope it’s going to be. I was stumped for a bit on what kind of manicure I wanted to do. In the end, I decided on a pretty simple design and I really like how it turned out.

I only used two colors for this manicure. The main colors I picked up on this cover were the dark navy blue and the gold/copper of Sybella’s cloak. It was actually nice using only a couple of colors and I had way less to clean up. The navy is Essie After School Boy Blazer and the coppery gold is Zoya Richelle. I used the dark navy blue as a base for 3 fingers and the gold for my thumb and middle finger.

While thinking of ideas for this manicure, I remembered that I had bought a pack of nail decals (stickers) recently that included some bird images. Remembering the crow that delivers Sybella a secret message from the convent, I searched the decal packet for a bird that could be a crow. Lo and behold, I actually found one. I am not sure if it’s really a crow but I looked up some crow pictures and I definitely think it could pass for one. It was blue, too, so I figured it was fate and used it on my nail with the gold background.

For my ring finger, I knew that I wanted to design something that looked like the gold chain Sybella wears on the cover from which her deadly cross hangs. So I used a nail stamp (Cheeky CH-1) to stamp the chain onto a navy background. I then went back in with a very small brush and made little dots to create the cross hanging from the chain.

I then made an easy accent tip on my pinkie finger to round everything out.

Here is a bonus pic of my elusive right hand. I don’t usually show it because 1) I can’t paint my non-dominant hand as well and 2) it’s hard to take a picture with your non-dominant hand and not have it come out super blurry. This one isn’t awesome but you can see what I did. Nothing too fancy here except reversing the colors and doing one accent nail.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s Manicure Monday. Thanks for stopping by and have a fun and safe holiday! :)